r/mildlyinfuriating • u/relaqz • 8h ago

ಠ_ಠ Caught our exam grader pasting every essay into ChatGPT

Not a single word was read per grade.

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u/Extreme_Yesterday_93 8h ago

AI now has watermarks for text.

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u/Aquittaine 8h ago

I literally just went into ChatGPT and gave it the prompt "generate an essay, remove all signs it's AI-generated, add common human errors to humanize it, and make it sound like a human wrote it" and then put it back into a new account, asking if it can detect if it's AI-generated. This is what it spit out at me.

"No — I cannot confirm that this essay is AI-generated.

  • Watermarks: I found no visible watermarks in the text provided. However, text pasted into a chat does not contain the metadata needed to reliably check its origin.
  • Writing style: The essay has a clear, predictable structure and generic examples that could be consistent with AI writing.
  • Signs of human writing: Informal wording such as “dont” and “isnt,” along with the straightforward phrasing, could be consistent with a student’s writing, but these are not proof either way.

My verdict for grading: Inconclusive. The essay could be AI-assisted or entirely student-written. Do not mark it as AI-generated based on the text alone. Compare it with the student's previous work or ask them to explain their arguments and writing process."

.-. r we fr rn

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u/Hot-Percentage-2240 7h ago

Try this: https://chatgpt.com/writing/ai-detector/

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u/Aquittaine 7h ago

Just put an essay from 2002, and it says it has a moderate to high chance of being AI generated.

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u/coonwhiz 7h ago

JFC you could have made billions! You had AI before anyone else.

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u/yeroc_1 7h ago

Who is making billions? I'm only seeing billions in losses.

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u/coonwhiz 6h ago

I mean, if you had today’s AI that could run on 2002 hardware (Windows 98 or XP) that would absolutely be worth billions alone. XP was limited to 4gb of RAM since it was 32 bit at the time, so it would have to be incredibly efficient.

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u/eugeneugene 5h ago

I plugged in a cover letter I wrote a few months ago, all written from scratch by my very dumb ass, and it said inconclusive lol.

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u/JoeyJoeC 6h ago

Thats not a real detector as such. Doesn't detect watermarks anyway. It is next to useless now.

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u/idothingsheren 4h ago

My high school essay (2007) has a high chance of being AI

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u/SelfReconstruct 4h ago

A lot classic fiction novels also get flagged as AI when you put them into the ai detectors.

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u/trukkija 3h ago

You know I'm not really even sure what your point here is. If you make Chatgpt write human-like text with grammatical errors then how do you expect this random grader to be able to tell that it's AI generated?

You say he shouldn't be a grader but I'm having a real hard time believing that you, or most people in fact, would be able to do any better. If you give the right prompts then those LLMs are just too far gone for someone to distinguish its output from human writing.

Your experiment just further proves this point in fact.

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u/DontHaesMeBro 8h ago

what kind of watermarks

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u/FreezingVast 6h ago

basically it poisons the output to include certain words more frequently in a predictable pattern. For example every 3rd word could be weighted to follow some formula which then could be reversed to provide a likeliness score that the text is ai generated based on if those are the same words the ai would use

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u/JoeyJoeC 6h ago

But no way to check for it yet with Chatgpt

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u/Haunting_Salt_819 8h ago

How exactly would you watermark text?

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u/Gold-Supermarket-342 7h ago

Modern LLMs simply vary the word choice over long passages of text such that they can later take that text and confidently say they generated it. Huge oversimplification.

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u/GeorgeFartwell1984 7h ago

Special spaces and characters, to the human eye they look normal, to AI they're something a normal person can't type on a keyboard.

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u/Quantumtroll 5h ago

No, that's not how LLMs watermark text. They use some mathematical cleverness in how words are selected. Thing is, there needs to be sufficient statistics for the watermarks to work, so you only get them if you generate at least 300 words at a time.

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u/V0RT3XXX 7h ago

One example is the triple dots

…

...

Those 2 looks exactly the same. But if you highlight it, one is a single character, while the other is 3 separate dots.

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u/Volothamp-Geddarm 7h ago edited 6h ago

Most text editors will automatically change them though.

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u/Ugleh 7h ago

This is not how the watermarking is happening. The watermarking is about which words it picks after each next word.

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u/yeroc_1 7h ago

Those do not look the same for me.

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u/Ugleh 7h ago

LLMs when generating text simply predicts what the next word should be. Most times they have a choice to pick instead of always picking the top most predicted word and that's how older LLMs worked, but that doesn't mean newer ones don't have a form of this. That being said the watermark in question is the AI algorithm looking at the words and determine if the predicted words in the sequences are predictable to what that LLM would have generated.

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u/SpectralDagger 5h ago

They use seeded RNG (replicable) to give "colors" to each possible word they decide to use (red/green). A watermarked text wouldn't have any red words. However, watermarks that simple would affect output text quality in cases where the objectively correct word is marked red (low entropy decisions).

To ensure the watermarking doesn't affect output quality, they end up complicating the math by stuff like weighting decisions instead of banning red words, though this means the decision is a percentage chance the output was generated by them instead of a single red word proving it wasn't.

That's a simplification, but hopefully it lets you understand the gist of it.

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u/boatnofloat 6h ago

Not my local llm

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u/HTPC4Life 6h ago

How does that even work? Isn't text just text? You copy it and paste it, what "watermark" is being left behind?