More from the analysis...

... Estimates of how many students use ChatGPT for essays vary, but it's commonplace enough to force teachers to adapt.

While generative AI has many limitations, student essays fall into the category of services that they're very good at: There are lots of examples of essays on the assigned topics in their training data, there's demand for an enormous volume of such essays, and the standards for prose quality and original research in student essays are not all that high.
This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

Right now, cheating on essays via the use of AI tools is hard to catch. A number of tools advertise they can verify that text is AI-generated, but they're not very reliable. ...

But there is a technical solution here. Back in 2022, a team at OpenAI, led by quantum computing researcher Scott Aaronson, developed a "watermarking" solution that makes AI text virtually unmistakable -- even if the end user changes a few words here and there or rearranges text. The solution is a bit technically complicated, but bear with me, because it's also very interesting.

At its core, the way that AI text generation works is that the AI "guesses" a bunch of possible next tokens given what appears in a text so far. In order not to be overly predictable and produce the same repetitive output constantly, AI models don't just guess the most probable token -- instead, they include an element of randomization, favoring "more likely" completions but sometimes selecting a less likely one. ...