Teaching ELA in the AI Era: Turning Spot the Bot into STOP the Bot

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

Just when you think AI had already complicated our lives enough, you encounter something worse. The latest development is a service that guarantees AI-generated essays will register as human, no matter which AI detector you use.

At the moment, UndetectableAI’s service is only a little more worthwhile than the AI detector it advertises on its homepage, which boast an accuracy of 0% in trials of AI-generated writing.

In reality, the Undeniable’s AI Detector merely serves as a magnet to draw students to its real service—making AI-generated writing undetectable. Despite the site’s ethical disclaimer about not promoting student cheating, the website’s blogs are awash in advice on gaming writing assignments.

There students can find tips that enable them to trade hours or weeks of valuable learning experiences for a few minutes with a keyboard and a website. Recent blogs offer details on how to plagiarize papers without detection from Turnitin, as well as steps for deleting a Google Docs version history. [1]

And yet… the “humanized” essay outfoxed even the best of the AI detectors, GPTZero, which declared the odds were 0% the essay was AI-generated.

Intrigued, I pasted in AI-generated essays submitted by two students who admitted to using AI to write their essays. I then asked Undetectable AI to turn them into high school essays. Fortunately, the results were sub-par. Undetectable AI uses a fairly primitive algorithm that links sentence length and word choice to grade level. The “humanized” essay simply shortened sentences and exchanged less common words for monosyllables. In fact, the “humanized” AI made a hash of grammar and sense alike in about half the sentences. The essay was also rife with punctuation errors. [2 ]

And yet… the “humanized” essay outfoxed even the best of the AI detectors, GPTZero, which declared the odds were 0% the essay was AI-generated.

Show me a kid who hates to write with access to a parental debit card. And I’ll show you a kid panting to run essays through Undetectable AI’s prose meat grinder.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

Pick Content off the Beaten Track

But teachers nevertheless have several remedies to ensure even our most reluctant writers fall short in their efforts to dodge working on assignments. Last year, tired of reporting students for plagiarism that Turnitin caught easily, I assigned content with a minimal online footprint.

For teachers with the power to choose their class reading, the under-represented book, story, or poem is an invaluable way to stop students from crutching on AI. Currently, AI bots hallucinate when students ask for essays about writing with virtually no information about it online.

As a result, when students use AI to generate the entire assignment, their writing will sound plausible. However, the writing will also dwell on details that never appeared in the reading assignment. For instance, a student essay, like the one below, seems human-generated because it features direct quotes. However, GPTZero accurately flagged all but the direct quote as AI-generated.

For instance, when Cheviot faces Terry Harlow’s gravely ill cow, he approaches the challenge with expertise. Through skillful and compassionate care, he successfully treats the animal’s illness, reassuring Terry that the cow will return to normal soon. “‘What’s going on here, Terry? You must have switched cows on me. You’re having me on, aren’t you?’” (Cheviot 219). This demonstrates Cheviot’s proficiency and dedication, saving the cow’s life and instilling hope in Terry, highlighting the profound impact of veterinary curing on the health of animals.

On first reading and without an AI detector, I easily spotted a dead giveaway that AI had generated the assignment. The story’s outcome was the opposite of the scene the AI had hallucinated. Instead of the veterinarian heroically saving a sick cow, the farmer cured the cow himself. AI simply fabricated the content, as it reliably does whenever you ask for more than one or two quotes.

This single step enables teachers to recognize AI-fabricated content. You just have to look past the opening paragraph to find it.

To identify a book’s online footprint, run a simple Google search, then scroll past the sponsored ads at the top of the results. Usually, with a good candidate, hits will consist of only links to reviews and purchases. If you spot any links to Sparknotes, Study.com, or any online plot summaries, find another book.

 Create Highly Specific Writing Prompts

Many teachers, however, have limited control over their reading assignments. Many of us face constraints imposed by the state, school, or district. [3] And new titles or even copies of older books can be beyond the reach of most teachers. However, you can still head off AI-generated essays by rethinking writing assignments.

Photo by Zen Chung

Remember, AI bots acquired their ability to knock out essays from scraping data from millions of online texts—like student essays. Other sources include summaries offered by sources like LitCharts and even YouTube. Because of this material, AI bots excel at answering questions about themes, characters, and symbols.

On the other hand, AI bots perform remarkably poorly when you demand two specific examples and a direct quote as evidence. This approach also works nicely with paragraph structures like Point-Evidence-Analysis (PEA), while also prodding students to develop links between argument and evidence.

In nine trials with ChatGPT [4] the AI-generated essays simply made up the second detail and drew quotes from the first time a character appeared in the text. Moreover, these quotes had nothing to do with the events I queried the AI on.

Because AI bots trained on book summaries, bot-generated essays favor broad generalizations that make AI-generated writing fairly easy to spot.

Foiling Bot Writing

Best of all this approach works even with novels that include Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, and Great Expectations, works featured on sites like GradeSaver . Because AI bots trained on book summaries, bot-generated essays favor broad generalizations that make AI-generated writing fairly easy to spot.

These two strategies are merely some of the ways that teachers can meet the immediate need to identify students cheating using AI.

 Every writer absorbs sentence structure and word choice from our reading. Reading is as vital to students’ writing skills as writing practice. To ensure our students develop much-needed thinking, reading, and writing skills, we must also ensure they do the work.

 Next: Other writing assignments that help students develop a voice without AI.

This article is the second of a series on Teaching ELA in the AI Era.

Footnotes

 1. A Google Docs history offers teachers one of the few resources they can use to identify if a student actually wrote an assignment. In contrast, AI-generated writing would offer only a single version history of the moment a student copied and pasted content from the AI into the Google Doc.

 2. Two versions of an AI-generated essay, before and after “humanizing”

Compare a snippet of an original AI-generated essay with its “humanized” version created by Undetectable AI.

 AI-generated original

Nestled inside the rugged terrain of the Yorkshire countryside, the farm bears the scars of hard labor and adversity. Mr. Atkinson, a humble farmer, struggles to make ends meet as he tends to his livestock and his meager crops. The farmhouse, weather-beaten and worn, stands as a symbol of resilience in the face of adversity. Unlike the lavish life at Mrs. Pumphrey's mansion, evenings at Mr. Atkinson's farm are spent in quiet, with simple meals shared around a simple table. There are no extravagant luxuries here, only the satisfaction of honest work and the warmth of comradery.

Undetectable AI “humanized” essay:

Tucked away in the terrain of the Yorkshire countryside the farm shows signs of work and challenges. Mr. Atkinson, a farmer faces difficulties, in making a living while caring for his animals and modest crops. The farmhouse, weathered and aged stands as a symbol of strength in times. In contrast to the life at Mrs. Pumphreys estate evenings at Mr. Atkinsons farm are affairs, with simple meals enjoyed around an unassuming table. There are no comforts just the satisfaction of honest labor and the warmth of companionship.

3. Many teachers admittedly face tight restrictions on the reading they can assign. In particular, laws enacted in states like Florida forced teachers to prune even their classroom libraries to reflect only books the state had expressly approved.

4. Open AI’s ChatGPT is currently the most powerful of the AI models.