Artificial Intelligence is used to sell a lot of baloney. It would be bad enough it were used only to teach badly and provide poor assessments of student work, but AI is also being hawked as a means of rooting out plagiarism. For an example of this phenomenon at its worst, let's check in on a little webcast from Mark Boothe at Canvas Learning Management System. He's talking to Shouvik Paul at Copyleaks, a plagiarism checking company and partner of Canvas. I'm going to watch this so you don't have to--and you shouldn't. But you should remember the names just in case somebody at your place of work suggests actually using these products.
We start with a quick intro emphasizing Copyleaks' awesomeness. And then Boothe hands it over to Paul, the Chief Revenue Officer at Copyleaks, because when you want to talk about a product, you definitely want to talk to the revenue people at the company. Incidentally, sales and marketing has been Paul's entire career--no computer or education background anywhere in sight. But this is going to be a sales pitch for thirty-some minutes. Great.
First, Paul offers general background on Copyleaks. An AI company, building "very cool" stuff. That includes a product that does grading of essays on standardized tests. It takes humans hours, but their Ai can grade those papers "within seconds" within 1% accuracy of a human grader. Spoiler alert: no, it can't. They have offices around the world.
So they were working on ed tech, and "as we all know" everyone from universities through k-12 is using some kind of plagiarism detection (oh my lord-- does that mean there are first grade teachers out there running student paragraphs through turnitin?). Paul says they found that some of the technology out there was outdated, meaning that when you're out there in education dealing with students, "it's such a cat and mouse game--they're always looking for new ways to beat the system." So we're going to adopt a cynical premise about those awful students as a starting point. Great.
"Let's face it. What's the first thing a student's going to do? They're going to youtube, and they're going to type in something like 'how to cheat plagiarism check' Right?" And he is showing us on CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Psychic AI and Plagiarism Detection