It’s getting close to the beginning of term. Parents are starting to fret about lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university places are wondering what freshers’ week will be like. And some university professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models (LLMs) than they are.

They’re right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: “If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background.”

Predictably, that arms race is already heating up. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that: “OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company hasn’t released it despite widespread concerns about students using artificial intelligence to cheat.” This refusal infuriates those sectors of academia that touchingly imagine that there must be a technical fix for the “cheating” problem. Clearly they haven’t........

© The Guardian