Michael HornThought leader creating a world where all individuals can build passions & fulfill their human potential. Author of the national bestseller Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career

The Rise of AI Education Detection Tools

Name: The Rise of AI Education Detection Tools
Uploaded: 2023-02-13T14:09:08+00:00
Duration: 1 min 31 s
Channel: Michael Horn
Description: In this monologue, Michael Horn critiques the rapid emergence of AI‑essay detection tools from organizations such as Quill.org, CommonLit, and others. He…

13 Feb 2023 · 2 min

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1:31

In this monologue, Michael Horn critiques the rapid emergence of AI‑essay detection tools from organizations such as Quill.org, CommonLit, and others. He argues that focusing on plagiarism detection is a misguided “race to nowhere” and that educators should instead prioritize the learning process, collaboration, and responsible use of AI tools. Horn references Sean Michael Morris’s call (via FutureU and Course Hero) to shift attention from catching cheating to enhancing how students learn and produce work. While acknowledging the utility of detection tools, he applauds the emerging narrative that encourages students to use AI responsibly to improve the quality of their work and, more importantly, deepen learning outcomes rather than merely chasing grades.

Chapters

Chat GPT certainly has turned a lot of heads in the world of education when it released its tool that effectively allows students to write their own essays. And so you're seeing all sorts of organizations like Quill.org and CommonLit, Dog.org and more introducing tools to help detect essays that are written by artificial intelligence. Now, I think this is a race to nowhere, in my opinion. I just don't think it's the right approach to be thinking about this. Instead of moving from a plagiarism and sort of cheating first propensity around students, I think what we ought to do is what Sean Michael Morris urged us on Future you to do from Course Hero, where he told me and Jeff Salingo more broadly, not just about AI, but that the focus ought to be on the learning process of students and how they collaborate and the work itself, as opposed to trying to catch them or something like that. And what I think is good at the same time about what quill.org, and commonlit.org are doing is they're saying, don't ban these AI tools that can help students write essays, learn how to use them responsibly. And so I think even as I'm not wild about the tool to catch plagiarism, I get its purpose. But I'm really glad they're shifting the conversation to then say, and how do we use this? To up level the quality of the products that students are doing, but even more important, up level the learning that's actually happening. And that's where I'd love to see the shift from the artifacts and the grades to the actual learning and objectives that students take away from it.