On Sunday, The New York Post posted an article about the homework policy of a University of California Berkley professor.

The article reports:

A UC Berkeley professor has stopped grading students’ homework for correctness after noticing artificial intelligence tools were helping them rack up top marks.

Richard Borcherds, a renowned mathematician who received the prestigious Fields Medal in 1998, said widespread student use of AI has undermined the value of traditional homework grading.

“Student use of AI for homework is now widespread,” Borcherds told The California Post. “Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty.”

…Borcherds now awards credit based primarily on whether students complete their assignments rather than whether their answers are correct, acknowledging that he does not know of a better solution.

The professor said it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish work produced by artificial intelligence from work written by students themselves.

“There is no easy way to tell the difference between human and AI generated work,” he told The California Post. “Occasionally one could tell it is AI because AI made a few characteristic errors, but AI has now improved so much that it rarely makes obvious mistakes.”

…Borcherds’ concerns about the future of mathematics were also highlighted in an interview with the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper.

“If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better,” Borcherds told the paper.

The professor needs to look at the tactic employed by another college professor to find the students who used IA (article here). That professor set up software that would insert the word “Madagascar” somewhere in the text that was copied. I am sure there would be an unusual set of numbers that could be inserted the same way to expose the use of AI.

All of us are going to be impacted in some way by AI. The goal is to use it for good and to make things simpler for all of us. I am not sure we are going to be able to meet that goal.