Matt Bury

Plagiarism detection for GPT LLMs is a bad idea. Change my view.

So far everything I've heard about AI generated text detectors has been that firstly, they're wildly unreliable & easy to defeat, e.g. simply change the first sentence & you get a much lower score, & more importantly, they give a lot of false positives & there have been cases where students have been falsely accused of academic misconduct. In the anglophone world, there also seems to be a bias in false positives towards students who's first language isn't English, upon which public universities are now relying more heavily than ever to make up for shortfalls in govt. funding.

Have I got this wrong? Is there some evidence that isn't being reported in the media? Can anyone here change my view?

P.S. This post was provoked by news that Moodle.com is now promoting an AI plagiarism detection tool: https://moodle.com/news/check-similarities-and-ai-generated-texts-with-advacheck/

I'm already there too: https://mastodon.online/@matbury

P.S. It doesn't matter which instance of Mastodon you join as long as it's connected to all the others... Well, you might want to consider an instance that's likely to be well maintained for the foreseeable future though.

Honestly, I find more people that I'm interested in following on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/matbury.bsky.social For me it's more about WHO i connect with & the stuff they share than the platform; As they say, "Content is king!"

Hopefully, SM platforms will become irrelevant as they become less centralised & people can connect regardless of which one they're using. You know, more like email & phone numbers & other interoperable communications.

Yep, this is why the GradeMe plugin is so useful. I'm surprised that this feature isn't incorporated into core Moodle. It's been around for well over a decade & is currently installed on over 3,000 Moodle instances. It's a big time-saver!

When we dig into what any government gets up to, we find that there are no "good" or "innocent" ones. There's certainly degrees of maliciousness, human rights abuses, & corruption so I suppose we could make shortlists of the worst by various measures. However, my question would be, "For what purpose?" What would we do with such shortlists? Are we to hold citizens & subjects of these countries accountable for the actions of their governments?

I agree that there are circumstances where boycott, divestment, & sanctions can be helpful in supporting campaigns for change, so what would such a campaign against the current US administration look like & how would it work? For it to be effective, I think we'd need open, reasonable, & fair justifications for such actions.

What do you think?

Hi Benoit,

There's a selection of certificate issuing plugins, some of which have online digital verification features, usually with a secure encrypted hash key. See: https://moodle.org/plugins/?q=certificate

However, there's a big drawback with course certificates of this type, i.e. Learners must remain enrolled on the course & the course must be active in order for the certificate verification to remain active. If a course runs multiple times over several years, you can end up with very large course enrollment numbers of learners who completed their course months or years ago. In other words, it creates longer term maintenance issues for Moodle sites.

Ideally, the courses should be separate from the credential issuing system so that they may be maintained independently of each other, i.e. courses can be updated or removed without that affecting formerly issued credentials. Good practice is to have an LMS for administering courses & a separate student information system for managing learners' records & awards. Does that make sense?

In this respect, systems like Open Badges, see: https://docs.moodle.org/405/en/Badges can push awarded credentials to independent student information systems to manage & maintain certificates/awards, & many also offer certificate verification/authentication features too. Open Badges are also portable & widely supported so that awardees can include them in their own workplace & personal portfolio platforms.

More about Open Badges here: https://openbadges.org/

I hope this helps!