Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays—and the trend appears to be worsening as time passes. Massaro said that, out of 25 students in his classes, it isn’t unusual for as many as five to turn in papers that appear to be written by AI.
When ChatGPT first launched, and it became apparent that students were using it to cheat, Massaro says he used to run papers through multiple AI scanners a day. If a majority of them labeled the prose as generated by AI, he believed them. Now, however, the school doesn’t allow them to upload students’ work to such applications because it could be considered a breach of their privacy. It also doesn’t help that the accuracy of AI detectors is unreliable.
Instead, Massaro says he must depend on his own wits to assess whether a paper was illegitimately conjured or not. To do this, he’s put together a checklist of tell-tale signs that a paper is AI. Whenever a paper is handed in, he consults that list. He shared some of those red flags with Gizmodo, creating a clearer picture of the hellish conditions that AI has imposed on America’s educators.
Too Many Em-Dashes
One hint that a paper may be generated is a plethora of em dashes. For whatever reason, apps like ChatGPT like to include plenty of these little. Now, Massaro has a test that he does. If he suspects a student of having generated their essay with AI, he will call them up to his desk and ask them to produce an em-dash on the computer. Frequently, the student doesn’t even know how to do it, he said. “I’ll be like, your paper is full of em-dashes, just show me how you did it,” he said. If the student struggles, it’s obvious what has happened.
No Indents
Massaro says, contrary to the style stipulations of the traditional college essay, it’s common for text that was copied and pasted from a chatbot to have no paragraph indentations. The output from ChatGPT and its ilk notably doesn’t have any need for indents. If a student’s paper is defined by big blocky chunks of text, there’s a good chance that a robot wrote it.
Perfect Grammar and Shallow Content
If a student hands in a perfectly worded paper that doesn’t have much to say, this could be another tell-tale sign of algorithmic generation, Massaro said. While there are plenty of students who may be good writers but may not have a lot of original thoughts, auto-generated writing has several tells that become obvious over time. Massaro describes the AI style as featuring “uniform sentence and paragraph length,” in which every “paragraph is about the same size, with a rhythmic, mechanical feel.” The writing may also have a “hyper-formal tone,” he said, which is often characterized by an “overly polished academic voice not typical of student work.”
No Drafting History
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