Preserving Academic Integrity in the AI Writing Age

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) language models in writing has brought about numerous benefits, including improved efficiency and greater inclusivity for writers. However, the use of AI language models also poses significant challenges to academic integrity and the credibility of knowledge. The ease of abuse and the potential for false or misleading information to be generated and spread through AI-generated text can undermine public trust in the education system and the validity of the information being communicated. To address these challenges, it is important to prioritize originality, authenticity, and critical evaluation in the use of AI language models in writing.

On the one hand, allowing authors to use AI language models can increase their productivity and make writing more accessible. For example, AI language models can generate draft text in seconds, freeing up time for authors to focus on more important tasks. Additionally, AI language models can help writers who struggle with language barriers or disabilities to communicate their ideas effectively.

On the other hand, the use of AI language models can also lead to a lowering of academic standards and a decrease in the quality of written material. As AI language models become more advanced, it is easier for people to rely on them to create written material without putting in much effort themselves. This leads to a decrease in originality and authenticity, which are key components of academic integrity. Furthermore, AI language models can also generate false or misleading information, further eroding the credibility of knowledge.

To combat these challenges, it is important to emphasize the importance of originality, authenticity, and critical evaluation in the use of AI language models. This could include incorporating guidelines for using AI language models into academic writing policies and encouraging students and authors to think critically about the sources of information they use. By taking these steps, we can ensure that the use of AI language models in writing supports academic integrity, rather than undermines it.

In conclusion, while AI language models bring about many benefits for writers, they also pose significant challenges to academic integrity. By prioritizing originality, authenticity, and critical evaluation, we can ensure that the use of AI language models supports, rather than undermines, academic standards and the credibility of knowledge.

Beware the insidious propaganda of White Supremacy

I recently came across a tale being distributed by a family member that speaks to the subtle, insidious white supremacy I was raised with. The kind that focuses on the symptoms in order to distract from the underlying, systemic issues that caused it. The kind that sends a child off to college “knowing” that awareness of race itself is the modern manifestation of racism.

The white supremacy that sends a child off to college “knowing” that awareness of race itself is racism.

The tale comes from an organization that promotes bicycling as a way for minority youths to escape poverty. It’s a noble goal giving the youths a hobby that connects them with mentors, teaches them discipline and physical fitness, and helps them make contacts in the wider community. All sources indicate that the organization is excelling both as a successful cycling team and as a way to improve outcomes for its members.

So why am I mentioning a successful youth outreach organization in an editorial about white supremacist propaganda? Because as much as this program does for the youths whose lives it touches, it merely treats the symptoms. By equating the positive outcomes for these specific minority youths to the potential positive outcomes for the black community, it says this: buckle down! Just try harder and you can do it too! It says this while downplaying the barriers the black community faces.

Yes, I did just jump from youth raised in poverty to black youth raised in poverty. That was the first issue with the tale. The tale was posted and told of taking five of their youth, who live in subsidized housing, to experience the Confederate monuments. It was accompanied by a photo of five black teen boys and ended with their names, four of which suggested the teen was black. After the trip the youths discussed their experience and wrote their feeling from the trip. The whole recounting and presentation of the tale created an appeal to authority about the impact of Confederate monuments on the racial environment because the authors were black teens presenting their own feelings from the day. This appeal to authority is made explicit by the use, in triplicate, of the all-caps word “their”.

The dangerous propaganda comes in when the teens describe that these statues have nothing to do with the problems they deal with daily. Problems like violence, bad food choices, and failing schools. Don’t misunderstand me, these are real problems that they have to deal with. And of course monuments do not directly cause low income neighborhoods to be cut off from jobs, but they do serve as a visible manifestation of the institutional lack of respect for poor, black lives.

It was white supremacy that extended loans to white buyers while withholding the same from black buyers.

Decades of white supremacy have funded schools based on property value and devalued property that is primarily black owned. It was white supremacy that extended loans and sold real estate to white buyers while withholding the same from black purchasers, sometimes explicitly for the purpose of keeping property values high. These forces are not visible to students suffering in underfunded schools, and so it’s easy to take them to see Confederate monuments and have them write about the irrelevance of that monument to their daily problems.

What makes this framing so sinister is that these issues are real and need to be confronted too, both the acute symptom and the root cause. When bringing out victims of white supremacy to write about their experience of the symptoms in the face of a discussion of making progress on the causes, this is a bad faith presentation to shut down the conversation. If society is celebrating and honoring white supremacy then, as a people, black people will not be able to compete on an equal level.

White Supremacy dangles current hardships to distract from efforts to address systemic hardships.

Such framing is also used when attempting to keep the focus of mitigation efforts on the symptoms. When the conversation turns to how to address problems like poor schools or a lack of mentorship, then white supremacy brings out success stories like these youth outreach programs to dismiss the prevalence of the issue. Because these specific black people were able to overcome hurdles most white people don’t face, it must not be a real problem, white supremacists say.

So beware the insidious propaganda of White Supremacy. It dangles the existence of extreme current hardships to distract from efforts to address systemic hardships. It dangles the success of an exceptional few to distract from the widespread hardships faced by many minority members of our great nation. And all the while it reaps the benefits of the lie of “equality”.

But that is just a theory...

In the world of online discussion, concepts like evolution get dismissed as "but that is just a theory". Everything that science deals with is only a theory, the physical sciences have no axioms. Consider the theories of gravity:

Observation

• When I release an object, it falls to the ground
• When I release an object farther from the ground it hits harder
• The object that hit the ground was the same object I released

Accepted Knowledge

• An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
• Newton's First Law of Motion - Inertia
• Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. (F = m*a)
• Newton's Second Law of Motion

Theory

• Show your work:
• The object changed from rest to falling, so there must be a force applied.
• The object landed with a greater net force (more F) and so either the mass changed or there was acceleration. The mass was observed to have not changed.
• Conclusion:
• "gravity" - the force applied to my object which caused acceleration.

Newton explained how gravity worked in his theory. It was generally successful for modeling how the world worked and could be used to compute future behavior. The scientific value of Newton's theory of gravity was that physical interactions of visible objects and the planet earth could be predicted.

Newton's theory of gravity provided a explanation for how Kepler's descriptions of planetary motion occurred, and in doing so showed that the physical forces which cause the planets to move are the same forces which we see pull an apple off a tree. It had corner cases though where Newton's equations failed to describe observed events, such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.

This does not mean Newton was *wrong*, as his equations still successfully model and predict *a lot*. It means the theory was incomplete. Einstein refined the equations with his theory of gravity, the theory of general relativity. For the situations that Newton had observed, Newtonian gravity provides a close enough approximation to the computations of general relativity, but general relativity holds up in cases where the predictions of Newton failed.

We also already know that there are corner cases where general relativity fails to predict events, such as the field of quantum physics. In time there will be a unifying theory which explains both object level motion and particle level motion, but for today we have our current level of incomplete theory.

So yes, you can throw out the "Evolution is just a theory", but to do so ignores the actual weight behind those words. All scientific proposals are theories to be replaced when a more conclusive theory is proposed.

Research material: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

I have begun a project to map the impact of American revolutionaries to the various Congresses based on a metric inspired by Erdös Number, or Bacon Number to the more pop-culture inclined. My hypothesis is that there could be value in visualizing how far any given Congress is from the folks that actually founded the country.

This project began as a late night tweet on July the 4th, 2017. I was thinking out the differences in revolution, founding, and actual governing.

I wonder what year Congress dropped to Founding Member number 1? Dropped to 2?#sixDegreesOfRevolutionaries #baconnumber #erdosnumber

— M Molyett &YA1 (@SecsAndCyber) 8:29 PM - 4 Jul 2017

Wanting to find some existing research and maybe leads, I reached out to Twitter and was given some good hints into starting points for mapping connections: Eigenvector centrality. Turns out `* Number` mapping of a population is a form of Centrality analysis. Since my recent academic background is Cybersecurity and my undergrad was a decade ago, it was very helpful to get nudged into the proper academic terminology.

Anyone familiar with US history? Thinking about trying to quantify the impact of revolutionaries in US governance via Bacon number distance

— M Molyett &YA1 (@SecsAndCyber) 7:34 PM - 5 Jul 2017

I am currently in the data gathering stage. I need to compile, locally and in a useful format, all of the people to consider, with a focus on determining who all will be considered Founder Number 0. This has so far meant collecting the names on the signers of the Declaration of Independence and today I was starting on enumerating the delegates to the Continental Congress. Turns out the US Government has already collected that data into a book:

BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

OF THE

UNITED STATES CONGRESS

1774-2005

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

SEPTEMBER 5,1774, TO OCTOBER 21,1788

and

THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES

FROM THE FIRST THROUGH THE ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESSES

MARCH 4,1789, TO JANUARY 3,2005, INCLUSIVE

Now, with that 2000+ page pdf in hand, I have the task of ingesting all that poorly formatted data.