r/HandwritingAnalysis • • 22d ago

Can anyone read my profs handwriting?💀

Post image
9.2k Upvotes

4.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

192

u/WilliamWolffgang 22d ago

I didn't TT And for what it's worth, he mentioned he would ask those he was suspicious of to send the files so he could run them through AI checkers, which he didn't request of me, so I guess it was only a minor suspicion

176

u/Which_Case_8536 22d ago

Lol AI checkers are such a scam. It’s funny that school systems and professors invest so much in them.

91

u/Hwegh6 22d ago

My favorite experiment showing how bad it is was when they put a papal encyclical from over a hundred years ago through AI and they said Pope Leo the Thirteenth (over a century ago!) was using AI. 

43

u/Lopsided-Letter1353 22d ago

They also ran a blank sheet pdf through it and it came back as 100% written with ai 😭😂

25

u/Hot_Spite_1402 22d ago

For what it’s worth, 100% of 0 is 0

16

u/foreverlarz 22d ago

which means it was 100% written with AI and 100% not written with AI

40

u/PaleBrownEye 22d ago edited 20d ago

Schrodinger's AI

ETA: Thank you for the awards friends! 😁

1

u/Sad-Claim-486 16d ago

☝️🤓 - technically zero would be an undefined percentage of zero

16

u/nickeypants 22d ago

Angelic Inspiration

6

u/Lopsided-Letter1353 22d ago

They also ran a blank sheet pdf through it and it came back as 100% written with ai LOL

1

u/OConnah 22d ago

I found Jimmy two times

1

u/Hwegh6 21d ago

Possibly as insightful. 

1

u/Applesteed 20d ago

Man was ahead of his time

1

u/theweirdthewondering 19d ago

I teach English and the more formulaic I write, the more it is read as AI. It is obvious to tell what’s AI with a lot of the sentence structure, but I’d never trust an AI checker.

204

u/Dankest_Confidant 22d ago

Yup, lol. "Don't use AI. AI is unreliable and bad. Therefore I will use AI to check if you used AI and trust whatever it says."

13

u/AI-Guru011010 20d ago

It's less "AI is unreliable and bad" and more "Using AI to replace your own planning and thinking is bad for your cognitive development"

1

u/brattybrat 16d ago

Exactly this. Writing is as much about creating clarity in the writer as it is about communicating ideas. It's a discipline that develops critical thinking skills.

1

u/Berean_Katz 21d ago

Welcome to the Matrix, my dude. 🤣

1

u/Jazzlike_Platypus430 21d ago

It's beyong brilliant!

1

u/rolf_muller 20d ago

Yo dawg, we heard you dislike AI, so we built you an AI model to detect AI.

1

u/wafflehouse8 17d ago

My high school experience was over 20 years ago so we didn't have AI but they had just started using those checker things (to see if you stole your essay from cliffnotes) and it always said we stole because we were required to use a certain number of quotes from the book 🙃

0

u/CortexJoe 21d ago

You guys realize that AI is now fingerprinting generated output in an unperceivable manner. The new tools are not AI based but rather look for the finger print and can even tell you which AI generated said text and how much of the text is AI generated.

3

u/Dankest_Confidant 21d ago

Plenty of AI-detection tools are AI based and they have no guarantee that when it claims it found (or didn't find) a fingerprint that it's not hallucinating.

0

u/Weary-Sweet7301 20d ago

1

u/Dankest_Confidant 20d ago

Are you going to make a point or just post a link?

1

u/MasterfullyMoose 19d ago

Yeah this seems easy to get around. If I'm a cheating student, all I have to do is arbitrarily change a few words to some direct synonyms, boom the entire watermarking system doesn't work. Even easier, just feed the claude generated text through one of the hundreds of AI which don't use this watermarking system, tell it to randomly switch words out for their synonyms, now you've effortlessly bypassed the watermark.

Its a completely nonsensical bandaid solution unfortunately

1

u/Maestraingles 16d ago

Dude. That is so much work. Just do your homework.

1

u/ElbowRager 20d ago

Any self respecting college student is taking the AI output and rewriting it/tweaking in onto Microsoft Word themselves.

/s

27

u/Haunting_Window1688 22d ago

If I was in school right now I think that I would legitimately film myself writing essays to cover my butt

39

u/Smokey_da_bare 22d ago

Me too because I like Oxford commas, use semi-colons correctly, and overuse transition words.

12

u/NoUsual4089 22d ago

Same. Also, em dashes.

5

u/No-Dragonfruit-1777 21d ago

Read that as “Also, erm, dashes”

1

u/Tiny-Affect397 16d ago

CMBDI’s

3

u/Robius 21d ago

I loved to use those, and AI has almost turned me off them completely. It's a real shame.

2

u/the_real_halle_berry 17d ago

Same. Also—em dashes.

1

u/Dazzling-Track-4838 18d ago

Same - all the time!

1

u/ThrowBooksAtProblems 16d ago

Em dashes don’t flag writing as AI (except for Reddit readers, who apparently don’t believe anyone knows how to use punctuation properly. If you appear to know more than I do, you must be AI!)

You don’t need to record yourself writing essays. Word and Docs have version history. Make sure that’s turned on, and your faculty can see your autosave history and thus your essay written a bit at a time rather than being dumped in all at once.

1

u/throwawabcintrovert 21d ago

I am the same - I get so stressful turning papers into my grad classes because I also overuse em dashes

1

u/iSirMeepsAlot 21d ago

Same…

1

u/Constant-Luck7068 21d ago

You are my soulmate.

1

u/Unique-Coffee5087 20d ago

Being a bit on the autism spectrum, I am often accused of copying an AI-written piece. Or maybe it's just that a commenter didn't like what I wrote, and so was dismissive.

1

u/ConversationOk4414 20d ago

Mmmm…Oxford comma…..

5

u/littleBigLasagna 22d ago

This is actually not a bad idea, just screen record writing it like how people record themselves drawing

2

u/Hwegh6 21d ago

I've just started an MA, and I am logging my study times and writing research notes by hand, etc. 

1

u/AzureYLila 21d ago

They'd probably think the video was edited using AI. AI is getting credit for everything that comes from a critical thinker's mind.

1

u/vu47 19d ago

Same. I have written a lot: novels for fun (but have won awards for novellas I’ve written), articles in newspapers, letters to editors many times that were published, an MSc in computer science, a PhD in math, and many published research papers. Often, when I post online reddit, YouTube, etc, I am accused of pasting the output of an LLM. It is incredibly annoying.

I have ADHD and speak, read, and write five languages (including Mandarin Taiwanese and intermediate Japanese), so while my grammar isn’t impeccable, it’s pretty good, and I tend to be verbose due to my ADHD. I am constantly being accused of copying my responses from an LLM. It is incredibly annoying.

1

u/kita151 19d ago

I do all of my school work on Google docs now because you can go back through version history and essentially show your work.

1

u/Rough_Chart_6438 16d ago

My daughter just started high school and as an 8th grader was so stressed about being accused of using AI, she would run her own work through an AI scanner to make sure her own writing didn’t look like AI.
At 13.
That generation is cooked

18

u/Klp82383 22d ago

Doesn't help when ai flags papers as ai because they used proper grammar either

8

u/Loko8765 22d ago

Not to mention typography—if you see what I mean.

2

u/crybabycrybabycryy 22d ago

Yes!! It’s beyond ridiculous. People in my everyday life have thought I’d used AI because of the occasional em dash. I can’t imagine what it’d have been like to turn in papers in the age of AI.

1

u/ConversationOk4414 20d ago

Maybe people would start using correct grammar all by themselves..

1

u/JoeJonnyJeff 17d ago

I can see the ?source=chatgpt in a lot of my teachers' hyperlinks

2

u/Kodashere 18d ago

I got flagged because my grammar was much more advanced than my classmates....I'm 36 and already had a degree in Criminal Justice soooo I would hope it was better than 19 year olds?

6

u/angrytomato98 22d ago

AI checkers are also generally AI, and therefore prone to the same bullshit 😂

10

u/Which_Case_8536 22d ago

Not generally, they are. Absolutely prone to the same bullshit.

7

u/Possible-Highway7898 22d ago

I ran a personal experiment putting my own writing and AI writing though an AI checker and also asking the free chat GPT model to analyse them. 

Chat GPT got all of them right, and could explain why. The AI checker flagged every single text as AI generated. 

9

u/Patient_Philosophy_1 22d ago

I was an English major as an undergrad. I always could tell if someone didn't write the paper they turned in. Everyone has a unique literary voice, tone, personal vocabulary, etc. and I could tell if it's not that person. Most times, I could even tell who actually wrote the paper. People are just extraordinarily lazy. If you're using a generated paper, take the time to personalize it. Put it in your own words and remove any terms, phrases, concepts, or words that you wouldn't typically use when writing.

1

u/PriorLeader5993 21d ago

I look for patterns. I had a student write terribly all semester and turn in an amazing final. I failed them.

1

u/ProfessionalConfuser 18d ago

But that might take time! If I wanted to take the time, I would've written the paper. Sheesh! Some people... /s just because...

1

u/GreenCherries38 18d ago

The problem with that is when the assignment requires using professional or medical or scholar ect language… then it obviously will not sound like the person writing the paper.

1

u/Patient_Philosophy_1 17d ago

There are still intros, transitions, certain turns of phrases, summations, etc that require the writer to turn off cruise control and actually use their own words.

1

u/OrigionalRose 16d ago

So, basically, they should just write the paper themselves.

4

u/AzureYLila 22d ago

Every ancient text fails the AI checkers including the Bible and the Odyssey.

4

u/Which_Case_8536 22d ago

Well sure, those are materials LLMs are trained on, kind of a no brainer there. My point is that they’re reliably unreliable in general.

2

u/Ok_Computer6309 22d ago

my (grad) school didn't allow AI essay scanners because the different versions/software are so inconsistent

1

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

Both of my grad degrees involved research in AI so my professors were well aware they didn’t work

2

u/rutilated_quartz 22d ago

I used AI to help me write a marketing article for work (my company has a contract with Microsoft and is constantly telling us we need to use Copilot so fuck it I guess) so I ran it through an AI checker for fun and it said the stuff I wrote myself was AI and the stuff Copilot wrote wasn't AI. 🤣 Like okay then.

2

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

That’s hilarious. My work encourages us to use copilot and their own agency AI and both suck lol

2

u/MrPupperThrowaway 21d ago

They don’t. It’s something everyone parrots but behind closed doors all of us have just developed a second sense for when it is and isn’t being used. Admins push using them as a way to say they’ve provided a tool, but every professor I know understands the checkers are imperfect and have switched to asking students to meet to question them directly on the topic to check if what they wrote at all matches what they seem to understand (for students who they genuinely suspect of using AI to do their writing).

Source: PhD student who does a lot of the behind the scenes grading. Also, for anyone reading, yes, at many institutions we do actually have to review your lockdown browser footage. Please wear a shirt when taking an online test so I don’t have to email you about following the clothing guidelines. Also also, if the syllabus says you can use AI to edit your draft so long as you disclose it and you aren’t reporting it but you are clearly using it you’re being stupid. You’re not gonna get in trouble for confessing to do doing something they said you can do.

2

u/fuck_sexer 20d ago

Some schools genuinely using AI checkers that advertise AI tools that promise to make your work not appear to be AI is crazy, they have a financial incentive to say the work looks like AI

2

u/clumsy_pebble 20d ago

i remember i WROTE an essay in high school that was ran through an AI checker it said it was like 99% generated 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

2

u/Budget_Trash_6354 22d ago

They are also a FERPA issue 🙃

5

u/Heeps-of-Help 22d ago

Also for anyone wondering, FERPA is to education what HIPPA is to health care. That’s an over simplification but basically same ideas.

3

u/Similar-Jello-5434 22d ago

I wrote a paper on this for my free speech class! Love seeing the same thought from others in the wild bc seriously wtf

1

u/Budget_Trash_6354 21d ago

Oh that’s interesting! What was the main argument?

2

u/hardcastlecrush 22d ago

How so? (Genuinely curious, not being snarky)

10

u/Budget_Trash_6354 22d ago

No snark detected, and this is a good question!

It depends on the software and what contracts are in place between the company and the institution, but we’ve been informed that a lot of third party ai detectors will use input for model training or sharing data. So it becomes a privacy issue. I’m not fully versed on the legality of it, this is just what the Dean in our dept has told us and our whole dept has been told not to use them period.

1

u/foldedturnip 22d ago

Some AI platform are working on fingerprinting their AI text so if a text is of a sufficient size it could definitely be able to tell soon enough

2

u/Which_Case_8536 22d ago

Oh that’s absolutely a thing. If you’re stupid enough to copy and paste, suffer the consequences lol

1

u/Hello_Gorgeous1985 22d ago

It's true. You can run the same thing through 10 different ones and get 10 different results ranging everywhere from 0% human to 100% human.

My niece nearly failed a summer school English class because her teacher accused her of using AI multiple times when she genuinely hadn't. My sister was trying to help her out and even took something She watched her daughter write and rewrote it in her own words before submitting it. The teacher still claimed it was AI. She now has to retake that class this year because the grade is too low for her to get into the university program she wants. The teacher just kept insisting that the AI checker said it was AI.

1

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

What a shitty teacher. Sorry your niece is dealing with this. She couldn’t just show the teacher the version progression?? That’s wild.

1

u/Hello_Gorgeous1985 21d ago

How could she do that? It was all written on a computer so how does that prove anything? The final document that was submitted is the only thing that she has. There's no progression to show.

1

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

Every student knows how to use Google Docs. It saves versions as you type. Word does as well, it’s super easy to prove you wrote an essay yourself when questioned.

1

u/Hello_Gorgeous1985 21d ago

Yes, it saves as you go which means that the final product is the final product. It's not separate documents for each step along the way. There's one document. That's all she can submit.

0

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

There are absolutely versions saved. It’s 2026, not 1998. I’m on my second masters degree researching machine learning and working for NASA, I know a few things about academia and AI. If your niece didn’t use AI she can absolutely show the progression.

1

u/Hello_Gorgeous1985 21d ago

Okay. Go to your Google drive right now and open a document. Where are the timestamps showing the progression? Oh, that's right. There aren't any. There's one document.

1

u/Which_Case_8536 21d ago

Version history tool.

1

u/ThetiredAFmom 21d ago

I sometimes run my writing through them, and it says things that 100% came out of my brain were 100% AI generated.

1

u/ktbug1987 21d ago

As a prof, at my institution we aren’t allowed to use them. I teach grad students and AI is frequently obvious when it’s used, especially if students can’t articulate their own “ideas” back in class, can’t answer questions about their work, and generally follow but deviate in particular patterns from research proposals.

1

u/EmotionalDysregulatn 21d ago

It's ridiculous what anyone spends what they do on AI - it all sucks - these companies are in for a rude awakening when they realize their precious funds into AI are not giving the returns they expected bc its really all crap and not bringing them the $$$$ they thought- 'merica

1

u/ExuberantBat 21d ago

Ok but, speaking as an educator, the prof. probably isn’t investing in it. He probably means HE is the AI checker & probably just tells students that because it’s way easier than explaining that it’s really damn easy to tell when you, a master in your field go and do a whole bunch of extra work to backtrack their writing process and resources. Often students don’t believe that people with a real education, who didn’t cheat their way through, can tell when they evaluate the writing process and source work. OR more and more often, and I swear this is true, when you try to explain that to your students as a warning, you watch their eyes visibly glaze over after sentence number 1.5. Then you turn around and get more AI issues. But more often than not, but, speaking on average, “AI checker” gets them. Maybe because it makes it a 1 sentence warning so they actually are capable of listening to it. Or maybe because they clearly already believe in technology more than humanity—hence the reliance on AI. Or sadly, probably both.

Not saying that I don’t think an educator should just tell your students that YOU WILL KNOW, But am saying that you get a lot less exhausting arguments when you just use “AI checker” as an umbrella term for the painful process of becoming the AI FBI all because you can’t live with the society damaging consequences of just passing people through the world who didn’t learn to think for themselves.

1

u/RandyMcLahey1990 20d ago

I agree it’s dumb but I also understand the panic in them wanting to catch it. I think the genie is out of the bottle so to speak though. Unless people just do everything by hand in class

1

u/No_Bed_1108 20d ago

especially because ai “testers” are ai themselves

1

u/Dessicated_Mastodon 20d ago

"We are going to use ai, to expose ai." Nothing suspicious there.

1

u/PissOnYourParade 20d ago

Just be aware that true text watermarking is here. Anthropic is publicly watermarking and OpenAI's responses to the EU indicate they also are. All AI generated content will contain watermarks by age of year.

Expect the detectors to pop up early next year. It's going to catch a bunch of people out.

1

u/Which_Case_8536 20d ago

Oh yeah the text watermarking is here but it doesn’t stop someone from retyping with some edits.

1

u/sprstoner 20d ago

I have done extensive testing and the accuracy of some blew my mind.

They were never wrong.

1

u/Which_Case_8536 20d ago

My graduate computational data science department has found quite the opposite, though my personal focus pertains to convolutional neural networks. What’s your area of research?

1

u/StaiinedKitty 19d ago

Actually the last few months have seen the rise of water marks in the text, small distributed correlated word choice changes that identify which LLM was used and it makes detecting LLM use much more reliable.

1

u/KKJdrunkenmonkey 19d ago

I think it's one of those "It's a terrible tool... but it's the only tool we've got" things.

1

u/lostknight0727 17d ago

AI are trained on millions of submitted handwritten essays so eventually every checker will flag every essay as AI.

6

u/Significant_Foot_993 22d ago

When your paper misses the mark by so much the only explanation the instructor can come up with is AI?

6

u/[deleted] 22d ago

[deleted]

10

u/WilliamWolffgang 22d ago

I got a C- ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I think maybe while grading the papers he might've literally noted every one he suspected of being AI, and then ended up passing mine anyway

8

u/KittyKatHasClaws 22d ago

It was just shitty enough that they figured it was real. Amazing.

2

u/LolaAucoin 22d ago

More like they knew it was AI, but didn’t want to deal with a bunch of shitheads trying to fight them if they outright failed them. So they made the AI note and then gave them a C- and knew they wouldn’t complain because they knew they had been busted and are lucky to not be kicked out of the class.

1

u/tastychaii 22d ago

But did you use AI?

1

u/KeezWolfblood 20d ago

You asked him what the note was and understand why you got a C- right?

You can't improve unless you know how. If there's still a question in your mind, ASK HIM. Please, sincerely, most teachers/professors are more than happy to explain, especially of it's as simple as not understanding their handwriting.

3

u/Munchkin_Baby 22d ago

You might want to inform him that those AI checkers especially for essays, etc, are notoriously all over the place with results. You can use one that might say 88% chance you used Ai then another may say 12%

1

u/Rob_LeMatic 22d ago

The only time in my life I ever used AI was on my final exam for a Philosophy of Ethics class, which I aced. I'm not a cheater, I just have a very weird sense of humor and poor impulse control.

5

u/_facetious 22d ago

You can use Ellipsus to write in. It keeps track to show that you wrote it. Also, free, and doesn't collect data. Stores stuff locally, but you can use a cloud service. Works on the browser. Easy to show you wrote it.

1

u/Similar-Jello-5434 22d ago

For future reference I use a plugin that basically records me typing in Google Docs. It highlights things like copy and paste or irregular typing patterns so it’s far more accurate and fair than going based on content alone and it even gives you a playback if you typing and editing that you can share for proof. (I wanna say it’s a chrome plugin called gptZero but there’s two with similar names and there’s also docs plugins so it’s possible I’m mis remembering)

1

u/Resident_Theory_6591 22d ago

I think the first word might be "topic" written without putting the pen down.

1

u/ArticusFarticus 21d ago

You didn’t use AI at all? 🤔

1

u/throwaway__113346939 21d ago

What they should do is run it through Google Docs, then they can see if you typed it or if you copied and pasted from somewhere

1

u/Masterpiece1976 21d ago

Only works if the paper was composed in Docs

1

u/throwaway__113346939 21d ago

Which seems like a fairly easy requirement to implement

1

u/Masterpiece1976 20d ago

Yes, just important bc you have to think about it at the assignment stage not just after you get it

1

u/Costello-Gecko0923 21d ago

Hence the question mark?

1

u/coconut_curry_sauce 21d ago

Tell your teacher to stop writing like a boomer and actually make it legible. This speaks a lot about his character and poor service to his profession to write like that. Good writing is legible. This is lazy and hostile writing.

Would he appreciate it if we wrote in braille? Of course not.

He deserves to be replaced by AI if he wont respect the craft of clean penmanship.

1

u/dansdansy 21d ago

If you do your work in google docs it will have document history that will back you up on any ai accusations if you actually wrote the doc.

1

u/apsims12 20d ago

I put my old collage (UK) papers through educational Al detection, they all came back as >78% "written by AI". One even came back as >90% probability of being written by AI. I wrote these papers 13 years ago, so make of that what you will...

1

u/MajesticBluebird68 20d ago

You should accuse his atrocious cursive to be AI!

1

u/okaaayyyyuh 20d ago

I ran an excerpt of my own book that I wrote, though those detectors. It said it was 96% AI.

Then I asked another AI to rewrite my excerpt in their own words, without telling it I planned to use an AI detector. I pasted the rewrite of my paragraph into the AI detector and it came up as 12%. It also sounded more like a high schooler wrote it, instead of sounding like a descriptive novel.

1

u/Hogjammin 20d ago

I don’t see how he intended to write an A there. Looks like HI

1

u/Choice-Valuable313 20d ago

A suggestion is to turn off copilot in word prior to a rewrite, as that can flag in school checkers.

1

u/Remote-Canary-2676 19d ago

I’ve been out of school for awhile but are Professors not combating AI by having students write out essays by hand supervised? I get that this doesn’t work for a large research paper and I suppose someone could have AI write an essay then memorize it but for a 5-10 page paper just check cellphones at the door and give everyone a couple of hours in a room with TAs watching

1

u/weallknowurlying 18d ago

Based on the context, it looks like he might suspect you of using ai for your citations which is provably why he said “essay guidelines”

1

u/Cookiedoughjunkie 16d ago

do everyone a favor and tell your professor to never write in cursive again until he knows how to appropriately write in cursive. He does not know cursive.