Something surprised me

 I guess I'm getting cynical with age (and maybe with exposure to wrong doing). 

I was reading through the papers again today before putting more comments and grades on them. Many of the people are students I have had in this class for the first time, so I haven't seen big samples of their writing (most of my exams are short essay type questions, which are different from a whole research paper). 

And I caught myself thinking: "some of these are *awfully* good for what might be a student's first effort" (And yes, I know: I had seem some of these before in draft form and I didn't really think this then. But, too be fair, the drafts were mostly from students whose essays on the exam were a cut above). And then I thought, "okay, how do I check these"

My old trick - of websearching a sentence (with quotation marks around it to return exact matches)  - which caught plagiarism (oh, did it catch plagiarism, though not so much on this assignment in this class because it would be a hard one to lift directly from a website), doesn't work on LLM work. 
 

I mean, there weren't any of the "tells" I used to notice with earlier gens - overly vague sentences, overly wordy writing using words that don't "go" in most scientific writing. So I decided "okay, all I can do is check the sources they cited to be sure they're "real"

For fifteen papers.

It took a while. I mean, in a few cases, they were sources familiar to me, and I was like "yeah, this one's good" but I did search the topics less familiar to me.

All the sources were real; none "hallucinated." 

I assume that means the students DID write their papers themselves, and they're either more experienced writers, or they worked with someone who helped them edit (that's okay, I tell them consulting with others is fine)

But I found myself angry with myself - angry because I suspected my students, all of whom seem like perfectly lovely people - because we hear SO MUCH about AI/LLMs  being used, and the implication is "they're cheating their way through" and I think it's damaged some of my trust. I mean, I am not great at trusting people to begin with, that's one of my problems (to be fair to myself: I had several "friends" or people who pretended to be such when I was growing up who betrayed me in some way)

But we do live in a society of declining trust; I think it accelerated after the pandemic, and I KNOW my ability to trust other humans has gone downhill even more (after a couple experiences of finding out later through the grapevine in the earlier days of COVID that someone had tested positive but chose to be out around people, including me, including people I know with immune systems less robust than mine)

But not trusting your students is bad, and is kind of a breach, and I admit I spent part of the afternoon wondering if maybe it's getting to be time to retire, if I'm just burned out and I can't keep up with how much things have changed.

And then I asked myself: why does it matter to you? why have you always been so hung up on ferreting out cheating, and twisting yourself in knots to try to formulate cheat-proof assignments (truth: it's almost impossible to make a take-home assignment that's LLM proof, and I'm kind of unwilling to take more instruction or lab time to make people sit and write in blue books, and some people's writing is hard enough to read that it would be painful) 

But the other thing? More and more I feel like the cheaters are winning. And so why should I, with my archaic, outmoded sense of honor, someone who is enough of a quixotic fool to do things the hard and long way all the time, stand in the way of people's success? I mean, look at government, look at tech CEOs: the deck is stacked. It's definitely stacked against my students so maybe why NOT let them do what they can to get ahead a little? 

I don't know. So many things about these times make me profoundly sad. And yes, I also admit I worry that in a few years, LLMs will be advanced enough that the general decision will be "the exceptionally wealthy, connected, or brilliant will get to go to one of the remaining universities; for everyone else there will be "chatbot professors" and it won't be good but it'll be seen as economical" and while I'm close enough to retirement that losing my job that way might be unlikely, it still makes me feel like......I did all this for nothing, that I worked at a job that's now gone. 

But also, yeah. The feeling that the cheaters in the larger world have won, and insisting on ethics all those years was stupid, that hurts me too.

And I don't know if I'm just getting old, or if the world seems more terrible than it is, or if it is just getting that terrible. 

And I admit, some days it feels like soon there may be no place for me left in it, and I don't even know. I hope I'm wrong about that. But you see things like administrators on some campuses talking out both sides of their mouths, promoting faculty's "academic freedom" (such as to disallow AI generated work) while also giving money to the companies making them and incorporating them into the departments that permit it. And I do worry that either i'm a fool for rejecting it, or that I'm going to be completely left in the dust and my ethical compunctions won't matter when I never manage to get another paper published.