The book report is now a thing of the past. Take-home tests and essays are becoming obsolete.

High school and college educators around the country say student use of artificial intelligence has become so prevalent that to assign writing outside of the classroom is like asking students to cheat.

“The cheating is off the charts. It’s the worst I’ve seen in my entire career,” says Casey Cuny, who has taught English for 23 years. Educators are no longer wondering if students will outsource schoolwork to AI chatbots. “Anything you send home, you have to assume is being AI’ed.”

The question now is how schools can adapt, because many of the teaching and assessment tools that have been used for generations are no longer effective. As AI technology rapidly improves and becomes more entwined with daily life, it is transforming how students learn and study, how teachers teach, and it’s creating new confusion over what constitutes academic dishonesty.

“We have to ask ourselves, what is cheating?” says Cuny, a 2024 recipient of California’s Teacher of the Year award. “Because I think the lines are getting blurred.”

Cuny’s students at Valencia High School in southern California now do most writing in class. He monitors student laptop screens from his desktop, using software that lets him “lock down” their screens or block access to certain sites. He’s also integrating AI into his lessons and teaching students how to use AI as a study aid “to get kids learning with AI instead of cheating with AI.”

In rural Oregon, high school teacher Kelly Gibson has made a similar shift to in-class writing. She is also incorporating more verbal assessments to have students talk through their understanding of assigned reading.

“I used to give a writing prompt and say, ‘In two weeks I want a five-paragraph essay,’” says Gibson. “These days, I can’t do that. That’s almost begging teenagers to cheat.”

Take, for example, a once typical high school English assignment: Write an essay that explains the relevance of social class in “The Great Gatsby.” Many students say their first instinct is now to ask ChatGPT for help “brainstorming.” Within seconds, ChatGPT yields a list of essay ideas, plus examples and quotes to back them up. The chatbot ends by asking if it can do more: “Would you like help writing any part of the essay? I can help you draft an introduction or outline a paragraph!”

Students are uncertain when AI usage is out of bounds

Students say they often turn to AI with good intentions for things like research, editing or help reading difficult texts. But AI offers unprecedented temptation and it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line.

College sophomore Lily Brown, a psychology major at an East Coast liberal arts school, relies on ChatGPT to help outline essays because she struggles putting the pieces together herself. ChatGPT also helped her through a freshman philosophy class, where assigned reading “felt like a different language” until she read AI summaries of the texts.

“Sometimes I feel bad using ChatGPT to summarize reading, because I wonder is this cheating? Is helping me form outlines cheating? If I write an essay in my own words and ask how to improve it, or when it starts to edit my essay, is that cheating?”

Her class syllabi say things like: “Don’t use AI to write essays and to form thoughts,” she says, but that leaves a lot of grey area. Students say they often shy away from asking teachers for clarity because admitting to any AI use could flag them as a cheater.

Schools tend to leave AI policies to teachers, which often means that rules vary widely within the same school. Some educators, for example, welcome the use of Grammarly.com, an AI-powered writing assistant, to check grammar. Others forbid it, noting the tool also offers to rewrite sentences.

“Whether you can use AI or not, depends on each classroom. That can get confusing,” says Valencia 11th grader Jolie Lahey, who credits Cuny with teaching her sophomore English class a variety of AI skills like how to upload study guides to ChatGPT and have the chatbot quiz them and then explain problems they got wrong.

But this year, her teachers have strict “No AI” policies. “It’s such a helpful tool. And if we’re not allowed to use it that just doesn’t make sense,” Lahey says. “It feels outdated.”

Schools are introducing guidelines, gradually

Many schools initially banned use of AI after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. But views on the role of artificial intelligence in education have shifted dramatically. The term “AI literacy” has become a buzzword of the back-to-school season, with a focus on how to balance the strengths of AI with its risks and challenges.

Over the summer, several colleges and universities convened their AI task forces to draft more detailed guidelines or provide faculty with new instructions.

The University of California, Berkeley emailed all faculty new AI guidance that instructs them to “include a clear statement on their syllabus about course expectations” around AI use. The guidance offered language for three sample syllabus statements — for courses that require AI, ban AI in and out of class, or allow some AI use.

“In the absence of such a statement, students may be more likely to use these technologies inappropriately,” the email said, stressing that AI is “creating new confusion about what might constitute legitimate methods for completing student work.”

At Carnegie Mellon University there has been a huge uptick in academic responsibility violations due to AI but often students aren’t aware they’ve done anything wrong, says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, chair of the AI faculty advising committee at the university’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.

For example, one English language learner wrote an assignment in his native language and used DeepL, an AI-powered translation tool, to translate his work to English but didn’t realize the platform also altered his language, which was flagged by an AI detector.

Enforcing academic integrity policies has been complicated by AI, which is hard to detect and even harder to prove, said Fitzsimmons. Faculty are allowed flexibility when they believe a student has unintentionally crossed a line but are now more hesitant to point out violations because they don’t want to accuse students unfairly, and students are worried that if they are falsely accused there is no way to prove their innocence.

Over the summer, Fitzsimmons helped draft detailed new guidelines for students and faculty that strive to create more clarity. Faculty have been told that a blanket ban on AI “is not a viable policy” unless instructors make changes to the way they teach and assess students. A lot of faculty are doing away with take-home exams. Some have returned to pen and paper tests in class, she said, and others have moved to “flipped classrooms,” where homework is done in class.

Emily DeJeu, who teaches communication courses at Carnegie Mellon’s business school, has eliminated writing assignments as homework and replaced them with in-class quizzes done on laptops in “a lockdown browser” that blocks students from leaving the quiz screen.

“To expect an 18-year-old to exercise great discipline is unreasonable, that’s why it’s up to instructors to put up guardrails.”

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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The book report is now a thing of the past. Take-home tests and essays are becoming obsolete.

High school and college educators around the country say student use of artificial intelligence has become so prevalent that to assign writing outside of the classroom is like asking students to cheat.

“The cheating is off the charts. It’s the worst I’ve seen in my entire career,” says Casey Cuny, who has taught English for 23 years. Educators are no longer wondering if students will outsource schoolwork to AI chatbots. “Anything you send home, you have to assume is being AI’ed.”

The question now is how schools can adapt, because many of the teaching and assessment tools that have been used for generations are no longer effective. As AI technology rapidly improves and becomes more entwined with daily life, it is transforming how students learn and study, how teachers teach, and it’s creating new confusion over what constitutes academic dishonesty.

“We have to ask ourselves, what is cheating?” says Cuny, a 2024 recipient of California’s Teacher of the Year award. “Because I think the lines are getting blurred.”

Cuny’s students at Valencia High School in southern California now do most writing in class. He monitors student laptop screens from his desktop, using software that lets him “lock down” their screens or block access to certain sites. He’s also integrating AI into his lessons and teaching students how to use AI as a study aid “to get kids learning with AI instead of cheating with AI.”

In rural Oregon, high school teacher Kelly Gibson has made a similar shift to in-class writing. She is also incorporating more verbal assessments to have students talk through their understanding of assigned reading.

“I used to give a writing prompt and say, ‘In two weeks I want a five-paragraph essay,’” says Gibson. “These days, I can’t do that. That’s almost begging teenagers to cheat.”

Take, for example, a once typical high school English assignment: Write an essay that explains the relevance of social class in “The Great Gatsby.” Many students say their first instinct is now to ask ChatGPT for help “brainstorming.” Within seconds, ChatGPT yields a list of essay ideas, plus examples and quotes to back them up. The chatbot ends by asking if it can do more: “Would you like help writing any part of the essay? I can help you draft an introduction or outline a paragraph!”

Students are uncertain when AI usage is out of bounds

Students say they often turn to AI with good intentions for things like research, editing or help reading difficult texts. But AI offers unprecedented temptation and it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line.

College sophomore Lily Brown, a psychology major at an East Coast liberal arts school, relies on ChatGPT to help outline essays because she struggles putting the pieces together herself. ChatGPT also helped her through a freshman philosophy class, where assigned reading “felt like a different language” until she read AI summaries of the texts.

“Sometimes I feel bad using ChatGPT to summarize reading, because I wonder is this cheating? Is helping me form outlines cheating? If I write an essay in my own words and ask how to improve it, or when it starts to edit my essay, is that cheating?”

Her class syllabi say things like: “Don’t use AI to write essays and to form thoughts,” she says, but that leaves a lot of grey area. Students say they often shy away from asking teachers for clarity because admitting to any AI use could flag them as a cheater.

Schools tend to leave AI policies to teachers, which often means that rules vary widely within the same school. Some educators, for example, welcome the use of Grammarly.com, an AI-powered writing assistant, to check grammar. Others forbid it, noting the tool also offers to rewrite sentences.

“Whether you can use AI or not, depends on each classroom. That can get confusing,” says Valencia 11th grader Jolie Lahey, who credits Cuny with teaching her sophomore English class a variety of AI skills like how to upload study guides to ChatGPT and have the chatbot quiz them and then explain problems they got wrong.

But this year, her teachers have strict “No AI” policies. “It’s such a helpful tool. And if we’re not allowed to use it that just doesn’t make sense,” Lahey says. “It feels outdated.”

Schools are introducing guidelines, gradually

Many schools initially banned use of AI after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. But views on the role of artificial intelligence in education have shifted dramatically. The term “AI literacy” has become a buzzword of the back-to-school season, with a focus on how to balance the strengths of AI with its risks and challenges.

Over the summer, several colleges and universities convened their AI task forces to draft more detailed guidelines or provide faculty with new instructions.

The University of California, Berkeley emailed all faculty new AI guidance that instructs them to “include a clear statement on their syllabus about course expectations” around AI use. The guidance offered language for three sample syllabus statements — for courses that require AI, ban AI in and out of class, or allow some AI use.

“In the absence of such a statement, students may be more likely to use these technologies inappropriately,” the email said, stressing that AI is “creating new confusion about what might constitute legitimate methods for completing student work.”

At Carnegie Mellon University there has been a huge uptick in academic responsibility violations due to AI but often students aren’t aware they’ve done anything wrong, says Rebekah Fitzsimmons, chair of the AI faculty advising committee at the university’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.

For example, one English language learner wrote an assignment in his native language and used DeepL, an AI-powered translation tool, to translate his work to English but didn’t realize the platform also altered his language, which was flagged by an AI detector.

Enforcing academic integrity policies has been complicated by AI, which is hard to detect and even harder to prove, said Fitzsimmons. Faculty are allowed flexibility when they believe a student has unintentionally crossed a line but are now more hesitant to point out violations because they don’t want to accuse students unfairly, and students are worried that if they are falsely accused there is no way to prove their innocence.

Over the summer, Fitzsimmons helped draft detailed new guidelines for students and faculty that strive to create more clarity. Faculty have been told that a blanket ban on AI “is not a viable policy” unless instructors make changes to the way they teach and assess students. A lot of faculty are doing away with take-home exams. Some have returned to pen and paper tests in class, she said, and others have moved to “flipped classrooms,” where homework is done in class.

Emily DeJeu, who teaches communication courses at Carnegie Mellon’s business school, has eliminated writing assignments as homework and replaced them with in-class quizzes done on laptops in “a lockdown browser” that blocks students from leaving the quiz screen.

“To expect an 18-year-old to exercise great discipline is unreasonable, that’s why it’s up to instructors to put up guardrails.”

___

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

What is meant by the term “AI-generated content” is material that is produced by an artificial intelligence system. The material may include photos and music in addition to written information such as blogs, articles, essays, and business plans, among other types of written content.

Many times, it’s impossible to discern AI-generated material from stuff that people really authored. And this may occasionally raise some ethical concerns.

While there isn’t a body in place to oversee the usage of AI, numerous algorithms and techniques are being created to recognize AI-generated material.

Here’s how Google, the search engine behemoth, is approaching the issue of AI-generated content.

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How Google Detects AI-Generated Content

To answer the question, certainly, Google can detect AI-generated material – sort of!

To show this, we’ll be relying mostly on written content.

Google is always building and refining new algorithms to deal with the challenge of AI-generated stuff.

With algorithms, Google can check for how well-written stuff is, as well as numerous abnormalities and patterns that show up in AI-generated content. Google will look for sentences that are meaningless to human readers but incorporate keywords. The organization will also check for content developed utilizing stochastic models and sequences like Markov chains.

Google also checks for information generated by scraping RSS feeds. Content stitched from various internet sources without delivering any genuine value will also be identified as AI-generated content. Content produced by deliberate obfuscation and like-for-like replacement of words with synonyms will be identified as AI-generated content.

Basically, if it fits within a framework that is recognized by the algorithm, Google flags it.

That However, although text written by older NLP models like GPT-1 and GPT-2 is simple to identify, the current GPT-3 is more advanced and is difficult to discover, hence the “sort of.”

Google believes that the more they become better at recognizing AI-generated stuff, the more the creators of these tools find strategies to get better and escape the system. Google’s search champion, John Mueller, likens this to a “cat and mouse” game.

Tools such as uniqueness. AI exists that can also assess whether stuff was created by AI writers, such ChatGPT. They offer an AI material identification Chrome plugin that allows you free credits to evaluate whether the stuff you are viewing is AI-produced.

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The significance of detecting AI-generated content

• At its very core, the fundamental goal for designing algorithms to recognize
• AI-generated stuff is ethics. How ethical is it to exploit stuff developed by
• AI? Does AI-produced work come under plagiarism or copyright

restrictions, or is it actually newly generated data?

Many universities and other educational institutions require students work on material independently without submitting AI-generated content or outsourcing it. Mainly because these universities fear that if students leave all their papers to AI, they would get duller.

Also, companies and SEO firms pay copywriters and content writers to develop stuff for them. Sadly, some of these writers deploy AI to generate stuff that may not meet the specific aims of their customers. Making it even more crucial to recognize AI-generated stuff.

Currently, Google penalizes websites and blogs for having AI-generated content. John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, disclosed that Google considers all AI-generated content to be spam.

He noted that applying machine learning techniques to generate material is seen as the same as translation hacks, word shuffling, synonym manipulation, and other similar tactics. He further indicated that Google would introduce a manual penalty for AI-generated content.

This difficulty isn’t going away.

AI-generated content is the newest daily application of machine learning to our everyday life. More and more AI-content generations are springing up, with their creators trying to rip off their portion of consumers and earn some market share as users increase.

But Google will always be there to detect AI-generated stuff and its consumers. Google has always found a way to prevail against Black Hat SEO strategies and other unethical means that people use to bypass its SEO constraints, and this won’t be different.

AI-generated content won’t go away. But they will be employed appropriately. The American political scientist John Mueller predicts that AI content generators will be utilized responsibly for content planning and to reduce grammatical and spelling challenges. This is separate from deploying AI to churn out written work within minutes.

The challenge of AI-generated material is pretty new, but as the business has always done, Google will always innovate and build more precise approaches to spot AI-generated content.

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Outline of the Article

Introduct Introduction to AI-Written Contentstanding how Google recognizes AI-written content

• Crawling and indexing
• Natural language processing
• Machine learning algorithms

3. Techniques employed by AI detectors to recognize AI writing

• Pattern recognition
• Linguistic analysis
• Semantic understanding

4. Google Classroom’s technique to identifying AI writing

• Plagiarism detection tools
• Manual review processes
• Collaboration with AI detection experts
• 5. Does Google prioritize AI-written content differently?
• Impact on search engine rankings

• User experience considerations

Conclusion

How Does Google Detect AI-Written Content?

In today’s digital age, the advent of artificial intelligence has led to the production of material made by machines that is frequently indistinguishable from human-written language. This issue raises problems about how search engines like Google handle such material and if they can successfully recognize AI-generated text. Let’s look into the processes underlying Google’s recognition of AI-written material and discuss the consequences for content providers and viewers alike.

Introduction to AI-Written Content

With the emergence of AI technology, the environment of content production has undergone a substantial upheaval.AI-driven tools and algorithms can already write articles, blogs, and even novels with astonishing accuracy and fluency. This breakthrough has prompted both enthusiasm and anxiety throughout the digital world, as the borders between human and machine-generated material blur.

Plagiarism detection tools

Manual review methods

Collaboration with AI detection experts

5. Does Google rank AI-written content differently?

Impact on search engine rankings

User experience considerations

Conclusion

How Does Google Detect AI-Written Content?

In today’s digital era, the emergence of artificial intelligence has led to the creation of content created by computers that is often indistinguishable from human-written text. This issue presents questions concerning how search engines like Google handle such information and whether they can correctly detect AI-generated text. Let’s delve at the methods underpinning Google’s detection of AI-written material and consider the repercussions for content suppliers and consumers alike.

Introduction to AI-Written Content

With the introduction of AI technology, the environment of content creation has experienced a considerable upheaval.AI-driven tools and algorithms can already create articles, blogs, and even novels with astounding accuracy and fluency. This achievement has triggered both exhilaration and worry across the digital world, as the barriers between human and machine-generated content blur. 

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