My losing battle against AI cheating

I cheated in high school physics.

Our world-weary teacher gave fill-in-the-bubble multiple-choice tests. For easy grading, he always arranged the correct marks in a pattern — an upside-down V, a diagonal slash. I’d steal a glance at a smart kids’ answer sheet to set my bubbles for a perfect score.    

Students have always cheated. It’s a time saver, not to mention the Bart Simpson bad boy buzz of outsmarting the authorities. Skipping class, stealing tests, and other hijinks to beer pong on is the stuff of great classic comedy like Animal House and Cheats.  

I’ve had students copying from their seatmates and much more over my three long decades here at the Gothic Wonderland.  

A men’s basketball star once slipped a signed picture of himself under a colleague’s door instead of the final paper that was due, although that more attempted bribery than cheating.

The Duke pressure cooker doesn’t help. If you’re stressed by a million other obligations — and expected to get straight As, land that prize internship or, if an athlete, to spend forty hours a week on your sport — cheating can feel like the only way to get things done.

You might even save enough time to watch that TikTok of miniature chihuahuas on a water slide.    

But AI changes everything. I’m not a fan of tests, and my classes are heavy on writing assignments. Consulting AI for aid in understanding concepts is fine, but I ask students to do the class readings and write their papers in their own words. I cling to the hoary belief in the value of learning to read, think and make an argument on your own.  You’ll use those human skills no matter whether you go into medicine, the law, finance, education, tech or the other classic Duke destinations.

Wise words, and I have much to learn. But I do want students to get some practice writing the old-fashioned way on their own. Even in these new times, this remains a world of words, maybe more than ever between the texts, emails, reports, applications and posts by the gigabyte. You’ll do better if you’ve put in some work to hone your writing skills untethered from the digital master.

Nor is writing just any skill, like making duck decoys or patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought,” wrote the great mid-20th century poet W.H. Auden. “Words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” 

For me, putting words to page is how I think something through, sometimes arriving at quite different conclusions from where I started. You find out what of your ideas hold up and what don’t when tasked with the daunting job of filling the blank page with something that rings true to yourself.

Spotting AI fakery isn’t very hard, especially when you’ve waded through as many thousands of essays as I have.  That pseudo-thoughtful voice grates with its “furthermores” and “howevers” in what tends to mediocre pasteurized parody of a college essay. 

Some of my students employ ChatGPT to turn their draft into a finished essay, which bleaches out errors as well as individuality into bright white AI empty word carbs. Others paste their machine-generated summaries of readings between passages of their own writing — or, heck yeah Flounder, make that platform earn its monthly subscription by doing the whole paper.

I get grumpy sometimes about the AI-ing. I like cool new technology, but I don’t want machines doing everything for us like WALL-E’s catering robots. Machining your paper isn’t fair to the students who put in the time to do their own work. My professorial ego is mildly offended that students have ignored my request that they write in their own words, not to mention thinking I’m too stupid to notice their AI drivel.  

And then there's the pesky matter of plagiarism violating our sacred honor code.

I still have a hard time getting too indignant. Many of my AI-ers will disarmingly admit to their transgressions when I ask them to a chat in my office. They proffer all manner of excuses real and invented, but I seldom have the appetite to fulfill my threats about lowering grades, except sometimes for the most egregious repeat offenders. The small matters of war, poverty and a melting planet matter more to me than whether a nineteen year-old does a lazy crap job in their classes.

I recall my cheating history. I’m lousy at science, but I took another physics class to fulfill a college requirement. The professor was a funny and brilliant hippie, and I liked putting in the hours to learn theorems and their applications by contrast to my skulking high school cheating. Sometimes those horse-and-buggy paper, pencil and gray matter practices of learning could even be fun, just like our kindergarten teacher told us.

But that was then and this is shiny, high-tech now. I love it that the majority of my students still do like to dive into the messy work of reading, thinking and coming up with views of their own.   

I’m not ready to join the AI-positive crowd, but next year I may try something new like in-class exercises or requiring draft histories to get all my students writing. Playing policeman stinks, and soon the codes will likely be good enough to cover their own tracks anyway. 

As we plug into high-tech devices, data streams and platformed networks, it’s harder than ever to draw the line between human and machine, virtual and real — or to be sure it exists any longer. 

You can’t stop technology and the floodwaters of time, although I’m not so sure that this strange world is heading anywhere good.

Someday maybe you’ll just plug a college education QChip into your cortex instead of spending four years on campus.

You’d save a lot of tuition that way.

Orin Starn is a professor of cultural anthropology and history.