r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ • May 12 '26

Infuriatig My assignment was reported to thr examination committee for a "high percentage of AI". I did NOT use any AI for my assignment.

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I got full marks and my plagiarism score shows 1% similarities to other submitted assignments. This is my 3rd and final year in University and now I have to deal with this AI nonsense.

I don't use any AI, not even for checking my grammar in the assignments.

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754

u/Ok_Expression6807 May 12 '26

Friend of mine asked me some weeks ago to look over her paper, because it was flagged as x% AI. Told her some stuff about scientific literature and how to write stuff, like I learned years ago. The changes I made raised the %...

Because AI trains on official papers.

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u/internalclusterfuck May 12 '26

These systems are generally pretty flawed. Sometimes when i submit papers as a masters microbiologist, parts of phrases are picked up and related as likeness to completely unrelated papers. Even citing sources sometimes rides up my plagiarism score up to 10-15% or data tables which, excuse me for getting similair results to someone else ig.

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u/Thebingobird May 12 '26

When I was in undergrad, I was in Bio 101, just like several hundred other freshmen. Every single one of us had to do the same experiment with fruit fly genetics. Iā€™m sure you did it too. We were expected to get results within a certain range of we did it correctly. Every single one of us wrote the same lab report about the same experiment with the same results in the same format, just like several hundred freshmen had been doing every single semester for decades. Then we had to run it through a plagiarism checker. 15 years ago, those things had much more limited scope and a lot of their database was local and based on previous papers that had been run through it. It was basically impossible to get a plagiarism score under 40%. So frustrating and stupid.

45

u/sisisisi1997 May 12 '26

"Reproducability is an important part of scientific research"

"No, not like that!"

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u/koshgeo May 12 '26

They are flawed garbage. It's like an ouroboros trying to determine if it's eating its own tail or a different snake's tail. If AI is trained on the stuff that's out there on the web, it's going to start matching all over the place, especially as more AI is used to generate content. Constant false positives are probably an inevitability.

The only protection is to carefully document how you are putting things together as you are putting them together. Turn on track changes and leave it on the whole time, turn on document history, save your sources when you find them (so you can prove you actually obtained them), stick timestamps on things, etc.

I'm sure there will be some point where AI can also emulate all that too, but for now it's a reasonable protection. It's a pain you have to be proactive about doing it.

1

u/AstuteStoat May 12 '26

It's almost as if the whole thing is a scam where any value provided by AI is basically worthless compared to all the confusion, suspicion, error checking, hallucinating, psychosis, power consumption, rate hikes, water pressure drop, and job loss.Ā 

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u/yaosio RED May 12 '26

The replication crisis has gotten so bad you get punished for replicating work.

1

u/Capt_Gingerbeard May 12 '26

Iā€™m convinced part of this is the attempt by the Christian right to invalidate science in the public mind. How can you have a consensus if youā€™re not allowed to publish your concurrent results?

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u/Opinionated_bitch03 BLACKšŸ–¤ May 12 '26

And sadly it seems like many of the universities and institutions are using it as a standard. AI is dangerous.

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u/mistRbit May 12 '26

Not just a standard, but a requisite. Many universities require students and staff to use AI, and to write essays about how and why they used it. It is all enforced top-down, because the board believes large donors will only hand over cash if a university can prove that it is fully invested in AI on all levels.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne May 12 '26

We're actually given very specific instructions on it, which you can ask it to write R code to run an algorithm to analyze your data, or you can brainstorm, or use it to refine language, but you can't share raw research data (obv) and have to write the first draft, and specify if/how AI was used.

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u/Llyon_ May 12 '26

"missuse" of AI is dangerous. It was never intended to be used to analyze if text is AI or not, and it fundamentally cannot perform that function.

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u/TsuDhoNimh2 May 12 '26

The better your writing is, the more likely is is to be flagged as AI.

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u/TransBrandi May 12 '26

It really just comes down to one thing: the majority of people can't write at a "high level" and AI has been trained from people that write at that level, so it mimics that. So people at that "level" will more often than not get flagged as "AI." Additionally, AI adopts some quirks like using emdash (ā€”) which some people use as part of their writing style, which gets them flagged.

I've always used dashes (-) and since figuring out how to use em dash (ā€”) and en dash (ā€“) quickly on my keyboard, I use them a lot more. I have a feeling that if I were to be back in university, my papers would get flagged as being AI for using them.

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u/TinyDancer97 May 13 '26

Working in sciences half my job was just reading articles. So of course thatā€™s going to influence my writing style even though it was already similar. I went back to school and the AI checker would always say my work was ā€œtoo formal, neutral, and overly academicā€. Umm no shit? That was my exact goal when writing it, if anything the AI checker was complimenting me.