Students across the United States are now turning to software known as ‘humanizers’ in order to adjust AI-generated essays and avoid detection.
The use of Artificial Intelligence is only continuing to surge. Impacting all facets of life, we’ve already seen some of the ramifications regarding the education system. Be it professors relying on it to make exams or students befriending and even dating unreal chatbots. In some cases, the ramifications are far more dangerous.
As it becomes more prominent, reports outline how the majority of students now use generative AI to some degree. From assisting with research to outright completing assignments, AI tools are having more of an impact with each passing day.
However, as teachers and college professors crack down with software to detect AI use, students are now taking an extra step. AI-generated essays, for instance, are reportedly being spewed out and then thrown into ‘humanizers’, new programs that iron out some AI kinks.
Students using AI are now falling back on ‘humanizers’
As NBC reports, professors across US colleges are now running just about every student paper through an AI detector. In some cases, individual campuses claim to have caught hundreds of students this way.
To ‘outsmart’ the AI detector programs, another trend is now emerging in the form of ‘humanizers.’ So what exactly is it? Well, in theory, after AI generates your essay, you would then copy it into a ‘humanizer’ which scans the writing and suggests minor tweaks to help appear less like an AI model wrote it.
An example of an AI humanizer designed to avoid detection.
That can mean minor grammatical tweaks or punctuation adjustments, or more sizeable overhauls to paragraph structure. The idea is that by ‘humanizing’ the AI-generated work somewhat, it avoids detection by fellow AI programs.
Some of these programs charge up to $20 USD per month, but it’s not only students who rely on AI that are using them, according to NBC. They found some students who write essays legitimately are also feeling forced to ‘humanize’ their work after having real writing flagged as AI.
“Students now are trying to prove that they’re human, even though they might have never touched AI,” Associate Professor of Education at California State University, Erin Ramirez said. “We’re just in a spiral that will never end.
“It’s almost like the better the writer you are, the more AI thinks you’re AI. I put my own papers into AI detectors just to check because I don’t like to hold students accountable without knowing how the tool works. And it flags me at like 98% every time, and I didn’t use AI in any capacity.”
Some students, according to the report, are even intentionally dumbing down their own written work to avoid detection. That means, in some cases, adding spelling mistakes just to appear human.
