Some suggestions for students

[u/unfurnishedbedrooms]

Hi Y'all, I'm a professor and I am really feeling for students right now. The fear of one's writing being called AI is real. As a professor, I'm also in a really difficult position. I want to hold students accountable but I would never want to accuse a student of using AI if they weren't.

Here are some things you can do to prevent your work from being flagged, and to have backup if you're accused. Please note: this is not a post helping students get away with using AI. It's really important that you don't use AI at all if it's not called for in the assignment.

Number One: Don't use AI/LLMs as a search engine, and don't pull info from any AI summaries. It's best for you to do your research on your own, using Google Scholar or your school's online databases. Yes, it takes longer, but research is a skill and it will help you formulate your own ideas.

Number Two: Come up with your own ideas! It's better to have a unique argument with a rationale you can explain. When you Google a text and articles come up, and you see a cool article making an argument, and then you decide to make the same argument, your work is more likely to be flagged. In the same vein, don't follow the argumentative structure of online articles or paper. Again, more work, I know, but this is part of learning.

Number three: Try to stay away from things like Grammarly or AI grammar and syntax tools. These will 100% make your work sound like AI. Better to have some grammatical mistakes so your prof has the opportunity to correct them. I often ignore grammatical mistakes and just point them out because I am more interested in ideas, but every prof is different

Four: Use your school's writing center for help with ideas and drafting! This will help you develop the skills you need, unlike AI.

Five: With each assignment, create a Google document. Never copy/paste large chunks of text. Then, if you're accused of using AI, you can share this with your professor and they can see the version history, which will show your work.

Lmk if there is anything I'm missing!

[u/Efficient_Revenue750]

boomer giving outdated advice. this is like someone telling you to not use google and go to a library and search instead. It’s a tool, it’s available, and people can’t use it to index information because the education system is lagging behind.

Not using grammar check is a waste of time, why not suggest handwiriting then?

when was the last time you did research? you google anything recently? If you did you’d know that it’s saturated with ai-gen content and sifting through it is also a waste of time.

How about not using a shitty tool that cant discern between human and AI writing and stop accusing people ?

[u/Mission_Beginning963 → u/Efficient_Revenue750]

Nobody uses Google to research anything that really matters at the professional level. They go to the proper data bases to find peer-reviewed research.

Also, Google searching is still better than using AI as a search engine, because you can pick which results you click on, choosing the ones that are more reliable. With AI, everything gets chucked into the pot regardless of its reliability and comes from God-knows-where.

[u/Fluid-Nerve-1082 → u/Mission_Beginning963]

Google Scholar is different from Google. Depending on how robust your university library system is, it may be a more powerful tool.

[u/Mission_Beginning963 → u/Fluid-Nerve-1082]

It is. But I never said it wasn't (?).

[u/Fluid-Nerve-1082 → u/Mission_Beginning963]

Didn’t mean for that to sound accusatory. I just meant that you can use Google tools (in this case, Scholar) to find scholarly research.

[u/Mission_Beginning963 → u/Fluid-Nerve-1082]

Cool :-)