25- AI tattles

A tell is something during a game, usually of cards, that indicates what is in your hand. Good or bad. Physical change or behavioral change. It encompasses a lot.

The use of AI, especially in a education setting, has tells as well.

There is the direct copy and paste of the output of a prompt. Warts and all. This is a glaring red flag to the people grading the assignment.

Try a little and reword some of the output.

But this is also a trap. You really should understand what the output says before you throw yourself on the mercy of the thesaurus.

Above all, know the difference in usage between lie and lay and lied and lain. Can’t forget their, they’re, and there. These three little words have forever stymied English speakers, native or not.

And is a giant AI tattle.

3 years into this AI game, universities and colleges are learning how to recognize and grade you accordingly. The university I go to has announced that any AI usage has to be on the university site. I imagine this is so they can keep on eye on who is doing what with what AI generator.

Publishing has also gotten wise to the AI slop that is out there. I have seen the stamp they are putting on some books. It proclaims that the book is “Human Authored”. I think this is smart but also vulnerable to copycat. The seal does have a seal number on it. I am not sure but I bet the numbered seals are searchable on the Writers’ Guild site. Nope, I just checked. They are not easily searchable.

The point is that if you cheat, someone, somehow is going to figure it out. That beggars the question Why cheat? in the first place. It is only your reputation and your admission to the university/college that is at stake.

Darn, I guess you’re just gonna have to do the assignment. With your own brain and your own fingers typing on the keyboard.

Darn.

School Me Saturday 7/26/25-students and AI part 3- spellcheck AI, a cautionary tale

Your spell check is lying to you.

In the before times, you know before 2022, spell check used to be of the actual world. A list that was carefully maintained by the company that ran the spell check program. Programs like the spell check embedded in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Well I say used to be of the actual world.

Now it is a computer program that has been trained using AI in pattern recognition. The patterns that they recognize is the correctly spelled world. And the myriad ways that a word can be misspelled. And there are so many ways a word can be misspelled.

Think they’re, their, and there. They’re is a contraction of they are. Their indicates ownership. There indicates place.

Which usage is correct? The spellchecker now uses pattern recognition to recognize if the usage of that particular word is the correct one.

Are you with me so far?

But when enough people misspell and misuse a word or a phrase enough time the program now lets the wrong word and the wrong usage to be accepted as truth.

Where it gets tricky is that the sentence “They’re over there” meaning they are over there can confuse the program. What someone meant to mean is place (there) over place (there). Which doesn’t make sense. Or the third person meant to mean Their (possessive) over there (place).

And the computer program which is not an actual person and therefore cannot think, allows it.

Because enough people have made that mistake. This tricks the program to thinking it is correct when it could not be further from the truth.

This is, and I can’t stress this enough, dumbing us down tremendously.

Kind of like evil auto-correct.

This is also a self perpetuating problem. People can’t spell, can’t write, and fuck it up either way and depend on a machine that is not a person to sort it out for them. And so on and so on and so on.

Until we are left scratching letters into the dirt again.

A duck is never a duck when you mean fuck.

The AI is patting us on the back and saying “their, their, their.”

School Me Saturday 6/28/25- Students and AI- Part 1

ChatGPT was set forth unto the world like a biblical plague on November 30, 2022.

I was just finishing my first semester of the PhD program when our statistics professor announced it to the class. They said that AI was going to be a big thing for, well, the world. There was not going to be anything that AI couldn’t touch. These programs had the ability to analyze reams and reams of data in a blink.

Less than 3 years later we know better.

Yes, AI is capable of doing amazing things and has vastly sped up the analysis of critical data.

If you know the correct prompt. Or the proper way to word your request.

When it isn’t hallucinating citations and facts that aren’t there.

The pro-AI people say well, that’s because it wasn’t trained well enough. I say that if you put crap in, you get crap out.

My statistics professor also cautioned using the new programs for schoolwork.

Don’t forget, it was released just in time for finals.

Colleges and universities had to scramble to put in rules and explanations of the rules. Some AI is encouraged at some places for some papers for some classes. Some instructors have embraced it and are teaching students about it. Some instructors have not.

It is very confusing.

For me personally, I have only used an AI engine when it was an assignment. I want to be responsible for all that I write, incorrect or not. After all, I was able to survive all of my primary and secondary education without online search. In 1993, Creighton had just put all of their books into a computerized card catalog. I didn’t write my first paper using facts from the internet until 2015.

Now Google is a verb and AI slop is everywhere. AI slop refers to low quality media, including low quality writing and low quality images. Kind of like AI hallucinating things.

Yes, I am older than Google. Hell, I am older than the internet. What a time to be a student! The rules are made up anyway.

One thing that is a bit comforting is that AI is not subject to copy right. Because a copy right means that it was human made and AI is not human.