On September 3, a graduate student posted on Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole after they challenged a professor's accusation that they had used AI-generated content. Comments have been discussing the reliability of AI detectors and the question of whether a professor's own work can be used to challenge such software. Commenters also debated whether the student should have let the professor know where they had obtained a copy of one of his papers. At the time of writing, the post had over 3,100 upvotes.
In the post, the student states that they are a master's student and are writing a thesis under a "professor [who] is also [their] supervisor." The professor had reportedly been using Pangram to check the students' writing for any possible sign of AI usage.
The student claimed that one of their thesis chapters had a high AI-probability score even though it had been written without any AI. They supplied several months' worth of notes and version history to show exactly how the chapter developed. Still, the professor insisted that this evidence did not rule out the possibility of AI having been used at some stage at least.
The professor also warned that the alleged AI use could affect whether he would approve the thesis.
This led the student to look into how reliable Pangram actually was. They recalled that the professor had previously published a paper on the same topic as the student's thesis. Since they couldn't get the paper through the library, the student found a PDF of it from an "unofficial source."
The student then took the professor's paper and ran it through Pangram. As their Reddit post says, it came up with a higher AI-probability score than that of the student's thesis chapter.
The student forwarded the result to the professor, arguing that it cast doubt on the software's reliability. The professor, on the other hand, apparently focused on where the student had gotten the paper and suggested that there might be a different issue.
Most commenters on Reddit supported the student, arguing that the origin of the PDF and the reliability of the AI detector were separate issues. One commenter said that the professor seemed to be "deflecting" the issue of whether the detector might give false positives.
Other commenters advised the student to go through the official university channels rather than directly with the professor. These recommendations told the poster to touch base with a graduate program director, the department chair, and/or the thesis committee. They added, "There is often a specific office that handles academic integrity issues."
Comment
byu/testar0zza from discussion
inAmItheAsshole
Not everybody took the story at face value, though, as some doubted if the professor's paper had really been written before generative AI was so commonly used. Also, a few noted that the professor's paper being published "a few years ago" did not clearly reveal when it had actually been written.
Another commenter noted that Pangram offers financial rewards for examples of human-written material that get marked "AI-generated." That claim could not be independently verified by the Daily Dot.
The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify this account, which is based on a Reddit post from u/testar0zza. The identities of the student and professor described have not been confirmed.
