back to article AI bots suck at marking written essays, not too shabby at old Atari games, and more...

Hello, here's a quick roundup of some announcements from the world of AI this week. OpenAI researchers reach the highest score yet on the computer game Montezeuma's Revenge through reinforcement learning, DeepMind teaches its bots to play Capture the Flag on Quake III Arena and the US Department of Education are exploring the …

  1. b0llchit Silver badge
    Pint

    Cheating done properly

    If AI grades essays, then AI must be used to generate essays. Only peers can grade proportionally. When AI and humans grade equally, then the singularity is upon us and we humans are no longer of any use anyway.

    Therefore, when AI is used used to grade, then the only possible correct way to deal with it would be to have our dear good students generate their essays with AI. Then, all will have good grades and the ministry of education statistics will finally be perfect. That is a commendable goal for the policy makers.

    Do not teach our students how to be creative. Simply teach them how to push a button. It is much more (cost) effective to generate educated button-pushers than to have thinking people. All hail to the future button pushers. The next step is to replace both teachers and students. The AI can and will produce its own perfect score. No human intervention required. All hail to AI; may the human race be replaced by a perfectly sane and rational alternative.

  2. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    "History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation."

    Whut?? 0 out of 100 for you, then.

    1. Mayday
      Devil

      It actually sounds like a few of the Project Managers (Agile of course) at my work.

  3. MonkeyCee

    Student support

    Glad to see amanfrommars is helping his fellow students with their essays :)

    Not sure AI is going to be much more use as a marking tool other than as a plagiarism checker. Even that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, since it doesn't always ignore quotations correctly.

  4. rskurat

    sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

    It's faze, not phase. Pet peeve of mine, I see this mistake a lot lately.

    1. Notas Badoff

      Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

      All too often now it is spelling by phonetic imitation. The latest jaw-dropper I've seen was a response to a question about shock waves in water, where the respondent mentioned a safe cracking method, which began with: "Get a settlin torch"

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        To hell in a handbasket and so on and so forth . . .

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

        This afternoon I had a guy accusing me of "using eminence grease" to speed up the building of a bridge on my property. Used the term five or six times. Seems he was upset that he wasn't allowed to build a similar bridge to make accessing his property a trifle easier ... never mind that my bridge lands on my property on both sides, but the creek he wants to cross is the property line between himself and city owned property. He's a bit of a nutter, so I just nodded & carried on with what I was doing, and eventually he left. It's kind of hard to talk over a tractor when the operator has no interest in what you are saying.

        It wasn't until after he was gone that I realized he meant " éminence grise".

      3. Teiwaz

        Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

        "Get a settlin torch"

        Perhaps it started in the late 80's - history class -German history 1918-1939 A fellow student spelt it 'sturblatielung' - (sounds like a nasty respiratory problem*) still better than my attempts at french though...

        * close enough.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

      Careful, you might feeze a sensitive author ...

    3. Robert Helpmann??
      Headmaster

      Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

      I -see- have seen this mistake a lot lately.

      FTFY

  5. Skribblez

    I think that bot was in my class...

    I sometimes get meaningless drivel like that from undergrads, and they are always shocked when they fail the assignment. They then insist that they always got “good marks” or “As” from their other profs, which makes me respond, “ I don’t think they actually read what you wrote...”

    Computers help for plagiarism checking but, as mentioned above, you have to double-check their work too because they flag false positives almost as much as they catch plagiarism.

    Best just to trust your own instincts and keep an eye out for variations in the prose.

  6. Celeste Reinard

    Artificial Idiocy

    'By those standards El Reg articles would probably score a big fat 0.'

    But as long as there are humans around, you will always be loved.

    Start with a joke: As I have the tendency to digitise books from the 70's, one about medieval philosphy in an alternative spelling as fashionable at the time in Holland, I had to reread every vowel and consonant to transpose it properly to current spelling, after a few rounds of machine aided correction. Yet, I found a beautifull screw-up, when I stumbled across the word 'incest'... Wondering what the machine meant, I looked back at the source, where it was perfectly legible 'meest' (most). (I am afraid we're doomed...)

    Do contradict me when I am mistaken, on the point of AI itself. As I understand, intelligence is dependend on the function of the creature - swap the intelligence of a cow with that of a tiger, and milking becomes a dangerous job. And vice versa, your kitten has become a vegatarian. Since this is the development of millions of years of small iterations on top of that... there are probblems to foresee, one is that of the response the AI has to give; it will be mostly to machines. As far as I can see, AI will never be 'human'; nor capable af catering to human needs, the most likely thing that will happen is that robots start 'herding' people, as far as they are not doing it yet: there are entire industries, with millions of people dedicated to this artificial 'entity', or 'parasite', as I prefer to call it. ... Enabling the current volume of humanity, by the use of incredible power, more or less directly from the sun, to grow a big as it is. ... Is AI not becoming a layer on top of our civilisation, as a 'parasite', a kind of creature that by definition changes the behavior of the 'host', to its own, blind end?

    End with a 'deep' thought: what if we would define the start of the antropocene with the invention of the first transistor in 1947, and call it, I don't know, Machene?

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