I’m sorry, so fucking angry. Students with sources that don’t exist. Students with sources that exist but then the quotation doesn’t exist.
I’m so fucking mad, because it’s extra work for me (that I’m sure as hell not getting compensated for), and it also entirely defeats the purpose of the fucking class (it’s writing/research, so like, engaging in a discipline and looking at what’s been written before on your topic, etc.)
Kill me please. Comrades, I’m so tired. I just want to teach writing. I want to give students a way to exercise agency in the world – to both see bad arguments and make good ones. They don’t care. I’m so tired.
BTW, I took time to look up some of these sources my student used, couldn’t find the quotes they quote, so told them the paper is an “A” if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is – no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?
If the policy for plagiarism at your school is a F on the assignment, that seems fair to me. Asking LLMs to do your work is plagiarism.
I mean, I could go to that, but I figure as a writer, to fabricate quotations and evidence is fundamentally failing work.
I’m trying to give the student the chance to save themselves too. If they just cited that (for instance) the quotation about “all great historical figures appear twice” was from The German Ideology instead of 18th Brumaire that’s not a problem – the quotation exists, it’s simply the student being sloppy at documentation.
However, to claim that someone stated something they didn’t – that’s just fundamentally failing work (it would be like going online and saying Mao said that “power grows out of the hands of the peasantry” instead of “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”).
I should note - my class has a policy that students can use AI as long as they clear it with me. However, they’re responsible for their work, and I won’t accept work with fake quotes. That’s dogshit writing.
it would be writing fiction, if they weren’t using an llm
Seems generous tbh, if I submitted a work with incorrect citing I would lose marks and I would have to accept it, because that’s fair enough
genuinely why? I mean I’m not saying you necessarily should go out and say “no AI you can’t even think about looking at an AI for this assignment”, but it feels like this policy might be a small part of giving students a perception that it’s fine to use for your class. If it’s impossible to prove whether or not they used AI definitively then why even mention it in any way, why not just focus on concrete things like fake sources and other bad writing
Primarily because I don’t want to police AI as source discovery stuff. Too much policing means students doing googles and using the AI summary would be afoul of my policy and I don’t want to deal with that. So the illicit use to write your paper is banned but I’m not really checking that and basically am upfront that their work is their own and they’re responsible for checking shit like this (also why this bungle is so infuriating). The whole “generate a wikipedia on a topic” trick it does can be a good starting point for key names, sources, etc and I don’t want to say all of that is banned.
And while I think since students pay for the writing center that’s a better use of time and resources (or hell meeting with me), if a student wanted to chat about their essay with the bot instead, I could see this as potentially useful for those with really bad social anxiety. Balancing what the bot says with what I say isn’t the WORST outcome (indeed as long as there’s multiple vectors of critique/possibility the student has to weigh and choose between my pedagogy is basically working). I don’t like it, but I don’t like a lot of stuff.
But fundamentally it’s because policing this kind of stuff is a time sink and a strict anti AI policy is just a ton of work. Instead, I try to assume student work is student work until presented with something otherwise. Which is also why this student is in danger not because of gen AI use but instead fabricated materials.
I try to be a generous and kind reader. I don’t want to be a cop. But shit like this forces my hand (I can’t pretend otherwise!) and it really bugs me. I want to help the students with THEIR work and writing and I try not to jeopardize that by constantly assuming it’s not theirs. Leaving the door open helps avoid starting with that attitude too early.
My feeling was just “don’t have a written AI policy” (or I suppose, flesh out what has been discussed under this post into a nuanced policy), not “have a strict anti-AI policy (on paper)”. I definitely wouldn’t advocate for the latter, both for reasons you mention and because it’s basically unfalsifiable.
Like, you don’t have to explicitly say “AI is allowed [with these conditions]” to allow it in practice, and I feel like doing so can give students the wrong idea that they can just go for it and ask forgiveness rather than permission (or more likely deny deny deny and then only when they’re clearly caught in it say “but the policy”)
I definitely appreciate your stance against teacher-as-cop thinking. I’m glad you’re in the profession and sorry you have to deal with this garbage
My goal (and I don’t know how exactly to achieve it) is to reverse this so that by copping to it quickly we can move to “do you understand why what you produced is shit and how the LLM did that” without them worried I’m going to drag them to academic integrity.
I don’t know how to get them to do it though. It’s like, I don’t want to spend an hour in my office pulling teeth about “ok, this source isn’t real, but did you document badly or did you use AI”
yeah… I wish I had a better suggestion for you. talking about it head on might help but that’s assuming they listen and believe you when you say you aren’t going to narc on them, and even then one or two speeches about it probably doesn’t break the bad habits they developed/reinforce in other classes over time.
Yeah. Years of being policed means they have every motivation to deny (and indeed, they tell each other this too).
It’s just an intractable problem.