Secret Sabotage

The other day my wife got a text from our sister in law about an incident that happened at our nieces school. She actually sent it to my wife and my sister in law since they both work in the education system, but given the fact that I do as well, I got pulled into it. I'd like to say this is the first time I have heard of something like this happening, but sadly, it is not. On top of that, I think incidents like this are going to happen more and more in the future.

You see, our sweet, innocent, loveable niece was accused of using AI to write one of her reports for school. Either that or she was accused of having her parents write it for her. It was never quite clear what the teachers insinuation was. Which as I have posted about before, brings up one of the many issues with AI.

The Seven Point Structure

If you do a quick Google search, it isn't too hard to find many pages referencing the Seven Point Story Structure. This is a method of writing that has been taught for ages at the grade school level. Sometimes they simply it down to four or five points, but the basic premise is the same. There is a opening paragraph that is considered the starting point or hook of the paper. Then you have several points in the middle before finishing with the conclusion.

This is a basic formula for writing that can be used for stories, but also adapted with a few changes for professional writing and term papers/essays. That's likely what most of you are familiar with unless you took a creative writing class in school.

The problem is, since it is widely accepted and abundantly accessible on Google, AI knows about the seven point structure as well. In fact, most AI created content utilizes this process or some variation of it. It's one of the ways you can usually spot AI created content, until of course you come across someone who knows how to use the structure. Then you need to dig a little deeper.

It turns out a AI pass concluded that the piece written by our niece was over 90% not AI generated. That should have been the end of it right there, but it ballooned into a big thing due to some poor decisions by the school that I will not get into here. The fact remains, AI is disrupting even the most mundane things of everyday life, to the point that even when you do things "right", you can still be accused of cutting corners.

Meanwhile I guarantee the adults use AI to do half their work.

I saw another story on Reddit last night which I can't seem to locate again now, but it was talking about people using Canva for their resumes. More specifically Canva templates for their resumes. Now, I'm a huge fan of Canva. I think it is a pretty amazing tool, and I have been known to dabble on the AI side of it a time or two given my absolute lack of creativity.

Anyway, this post had a recruiter talking about how they had a stack of resumes (it's called something else in Europe, CV I think), through an AI program to separate them or something. Anyway, it turns out that CV's generated via a Canva template have metadata attached to them that doesn't necessarily line up with the actual text.

I can't verify this of course, but in this case the writer was talking about how the CV from this nursing candidate in Michigan was being sorted based on the metadata into a stack of resumes for construction workers in Idaho or something like that.

If you understand metadata, it's not surprising to hear that something like this might be happening. Let's say that lady posted her resume to several job websites like "Indeed", and let's also assume that those sites use AI to separate and filter submissions because who apparently doesn't these days...

Think of all the job opportunities she may have missed out on due to her resume being classified wrong based on the metadata from the template versus the actual content of her CV.

Scary right?

It's almost like we are secretly sabotaging ourselves by using these tools. Even more so given the fact that most people don't understand how they work, but they are trusting them with basically every aspect of their lives. Even worse, we have the case of our niece where even when you are doing everything right, you still get the short end of the stick.

Our niece did end up getting an "apology" from the school, but I read it and it was one of those apologies that wasn't really an apology. Not I'm sorry I screwed up, but I'm sorry you felt bad about this...

Typical!