There is a need for solutions on several levels here:
1. Quick, tactical. The most obvious fix would be for AI companies offering web access to LLMs to simply make searchable all the text they generated, ideally via an API so aggregator services can index and locate text given samples of it. If you pay enough (corporate/enterprise subscriptions etc), your output doesn't get indexed. Students would be forced to find LLM services that don't do this but there likely won't be that many, as offering such services for free is expensive.
2. Classroom changes. Force students to record their screen as they work on the essay, so teachers can see as it gets typed out. Of course again, some students can overcome this barrier, but it's about raising the bar.
3. Changes of approach. The hardest fix but ultimately the only solution. Students are forced to write arbitrary essays ultimately due to a belief that this teaches people "how to think". Ask what the justification for a humanities degree is, for example, and you'll probably get this answer.
If teachers are awarding good grades to AI generated text either their exercises aren't testing this ability, or AI can actually think and should be protected as a sentient life form. I think it's more likely that these essays aren't a good way to test thinking skills. What could work better? Something more direct, maybe? Testing people on logic puzzles, rationality tests, bias check tasks and so on. I definitely feel our society has major difficulties with rationality at scale, and we saw this during COVID in which people routinely conflated rationality/wisdom with blindly outsourcing their thinking to academics and civil servants, regardless of the underlying merits of the arguments those professors were actually making.
There's also the other goal of teaching people how to write, but being able to write well is largely about being able to think well, once you mastered the basics of spelling and grammar anyway. With modern AI driven spelling/grammar checkers it's also less important to deeply master the rules, and time can be better spent on the learning how to think and structure an argument aspect.
1. Quick, tactical. The most obvious fix would be for AI companies offering web access to LLMs to simply make searchable all the text they generated, ideally via an API so aggregator services can index and locate text given samples of it. If you pay enough (corporate/enterprise subscriptions etc), your output doesn't get indexed. Students would be forced to find LLM services that don't do this but there likely won't be that many, as offering such services for free is expensive.
2. Classroom changes. Force students to record their screen as they work on the essay, so teachers can see as it gets typed out. Of course again, some students can overcome this barrier, but it's about raising the bar.
3. Changes of approach. The hardest fix but ultimately the only solution. Students are forced to write arbitrary essays ultimately due to a belief that this teaches people "how to think". Ask what the justification for a humanities degree is, for example, and you'll probably get this answer.
If teachers are awarding good grades to AI generated text either their exercises aren't testing this ability, or AI can actually think and should be protected as a sentient life form. I think it's more likely that these essays aren't a good way to test thinking skills. What could work better? Something more direct, maybe? Testing people on logic puzzles, rationality tests, bias check tasks and so on. I definitely feel our society has major difficulties with rationality at scale, and we saw this during COVID in which people routinely conflated rationality/wisdom with blindly outsourcing their thinking to academics and civil servants, regardless of the underlying merits of the arguments those professors were actually making.
There's also the other goal of teaching people how to write, but being able to write well is largely about being able to think well, once you mastered the basics of spelling and grammar anyway. With modern AI driven spelling/grammar checkers it's also less important to deeply master the rules, and time can be better spent on the learning how to think and structure an argument aspect.