Latest news with #AI-written
USA Today
7 days ago
- Politics
- USA Today
As a college professor, I see how AI is stripping away the humanity in education
Dustin Hornbeck Guest Columnist As the 2025 school year ends, one thing teachers, parents and the broader public know for sure is that artificial intelligence is here, and it is taking on more responsibilities that used to be left to the human brain. AI can now tutor students at their own pace, deliver custom content and even ace exams, including one I made for my own course. While a bit frightening, that part doesn't bother me. Of course, machines can process information faster than we can. What bothers me is that we seem ready to let the machines and political discontent define the purpose of education. Kids are disengaged at school; AI doesn't help A recent Brookings report found that only 1 in 3 students are actively engaged in school. That tracks with what I have seen myself as a former high school teacher and current professor. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. Many students are checked out, quietly drifting through the motions while teachers juggle multiple crises. They try to pull some students up to grade level and just hope the others don't slide backward. It's more triage than teaching. I tested one of my own final exams in ChatGPT. It scored a 90% the first time and 100% the next. Colleagues tell me their students are submitting AI-written essays. One professor I know gave up and went back to in-class handwritten essays for his final exam. It's 2025 and we're back to blue books. I recently surveyed and interviewed high school social studies teachers across the country for a study about democratic education. Every one of them said they're struggling to design assignments that AI can't complete. These aren't multiple-choice quizzes or five-paragraph summaries. They're book analyses, historical critiques and policy arguments ‒ real cognitive work that used to demand original thought. Now? A chatbot can mimic it well enough to get by. So what do we do? Double down on job training? That's what I fear. A lot of today's education policy seems geared toward producing workers for an economy that's already in flux. But AI is going to reshape the labor market whether we like it or not. Pretending we can out-credential our way through it is wishful thinking. School should teach kids how to live in the world, not just work in it John Dewey, the early 20th century pragmatist, had the answer over 100 years ago. He reminded us that school is never just a pipeline to employment. It is a place to learn how to live in a democracy. Not just memorize facts about it, but participate in it. Build it. Challenge it. Schools are not about the world; they are the world ‒ just with guidance by adults and peers, and more chances to fail safely … hopefully. That's not something AI can do. And frankly, it's not something our current test-driven, job-metric-obsessed education system is doing, either. Parents and community members also play a crucial role in shaping this type of education, which can lead to a healthier and more robust democracy for all. In Dewey's model, teachers aren't content deliverers. They are guides and facilitators of meaning. They are people who help students figure out how to live together, how to argue without tearing each other apart, how to make sense of the world and their place in it, how to find their purpose, and how to work with peers to solve problems. If we let AI define the boundaries of teaching, we'll hollow it out. Sure, students may learn more efficient ways to take in content. But they'll miss out on the messy, human work of collaboration, curiosity, disagreement and creation. And in a world increasingly shaped by machines, that could be the most important thing we can teach. The challenge isn't to beat AI at its own game. It's to make sure school stays human enough that students learn how to be human together. Dustin Hornbeck, PhD, is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies. His opinion does not represent that of the university for which he works. This column originally appeared in The Tennessean.
Axios
27-05-2025
- Business
- Axios
AI is perfecting scam emails, making phishing hard to catch
AI chatbots have made scam emails harder to spot and the tells we've all been trained to look for — clunky grammar, weird phrasing — utterly useless. Why it matters: Scammers are raking in more than ever from basic email and impersonation schemes. Last year, the FBI estimates, they made off with a whopping $16.6 billion. Thwarting AI-written scams will require a new playbook that leans more on users verifying messages and companies detecting scams before they hit inboxes, experts say. The big picture: ChatGPT and other chatbots are helping non-English-speaking scammers write typo-free messages that closely mimic trusted senders. Before, scammers relied on clunky tools like Google Translate, which often were too literal in their translations and couldn't capture grammar and tone. Now, AI can write fluently in most languages, making malicious messages far harder to flag. What they're saying:"The idea that you're going to train people to not open [emails] that look fishy isn't going to work for anything anymore," Chester Wisniewski, global field CISO at Sophos, told Axios. "Real messages have some grammatical errors because people are bad at writing," he added. "ChatGPT never gets it wrong." The big picture: Scammers are now training AI tools on real marketing emails from banks, retailers and service providers, Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security, told Axios. "They even sound like they are in the voice of who you're used to working with," Tobac said. Tobac said one Icelandic client who had never before worried about employees falling for phishing emails was now concerned. "Previously, they've been so safe because only 350,000 people comfortably speak Icelandic," she said. "Now, it's a totally new paradigm for everybody." Threat level: Beyond grammar, the real danger lies in how these tools scale precision and speed, Mike Britton, CISO at Abnormal Security, told Axios. Within minutes, scammers can use chatbots to create dossiers about the sales teams at every Fortune 500 company and then use those findings to write customized, believable emails, Britton said. Attackers now also embed themselves into existing email threads using lookalike domains, making their messages nearly indistinguishable from legitimate ones, he added. "Our brain plays tricks on us," Britton said. "If the domain has a W in it, and I'm a bad guy, and I set up a domain with two Vs, your brain is going to autocorrect." Yes, but: Spotting scam emails isn't impossible. In Tobac's red team work, she typically gets caught when: Someone practices what she calls polite paranoia, or when they text or call the organization or person being impersonated to confirm if they sent a suspicious message. A target uses a password manager and has complex, long passwords. They have multifactor authentication enabled. What to watch: Britton warned that low-cost generative AI tools for deepfakes and voice clones could soon take phishing to new extremes. "It's going to get to the point where we all have to have safe words, and you and I get on a Zoom and we have to have our secret pre-shared key," Britton said. "It's going to be here before you know it."
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
As a college professor, I see how AI is stripping away the humanity in education
As the 2025 school year ends, one thing teachers, parents and the broader public knows for sure is that AI is here, and it is taking on more responsibilities that used to be left to the human brain. AI can now tutor students at their own pace, deliver custom content and even ace exams, including one I made for my own course. While a bit frightening, that part doesn't bother me. Of course machines can process information faster than we can. What bothers me is that we seem ready to let the machines and political discontent define the purpose of education. A recent Brookings report found that only one in three students is actively engaged in school. That tracks with what I have seen myself as a former high school teacher and current professor. Many students are checked out, quietly drifting through the motions while teachers juggle multiple crises. They try to pull some students up to grade level and just hope the others don't slide backward. It's more triage than teaching. I tested one of my own final exams in ChatGPT. It scored a 90% the first time and 100% the next. Colleagues tell me their students are submitting AI-written essays. One professor I know gave up and went back to in-class handwritten essays for his final exam. It's 2025 and we're back to blue books. I recently surveyed and interviewed high school social studies teachers across the country for a study about democratic education. Every one of them said they're struggling to design assignments AI can't complete. More: U.S. lawmakers, Nashville music industry members discuss AI: 'Making sure we get this right is really important' These aren't multiple-choice quizzes or five-paragraph summaries. They're book analyses, historical critiques and policy arguments—real cognitive work that used to demand original thought. Now? A chatbot can mimic it well enough to get by. So what do we do? Double down on job training? That's what I fear. A lot of today's education policy seems geared toward producing workers for an economy that's already in flux. But AI is going to reshape the labor market whether we like it or not. Pretending we can out-credential our way through it is wishful thinking. John Dewey, the early 20th century pragmatist, had the answer over 100 years ago. He reminded us that school is never just a pipeline to employment. It is a place to learn how to live in a democracy. Not just memorize facts about it, but participate in it. Build it. Challenge it. Schools are not about the world; they are the world — just with guidance by adults and peers, and more chances to fail safely … hopefully. In Dewey's model, teachers aren't content deliverers. They are guides and facilitators of meaning. They are people who help students figure out how to live together, how to argue without tearing each other apart, how to make sense of the world and their place in it, how to find their purpose and work with peers to solve problems. That's not something AI can do. And frankly, it's not something our current test-driven, job-metric obsessed education system is doing either. Parents and community members also play an important role in shaping this type of education, which would lead to a healthier and more robust democracy for call. More: From GPS gaffes to fabricated facts: AI still needs a human co-pilot If we let AI define the boundaries of teaching, we'll hollow it out. Sure, students may learn more efficient ways to take in content. But they'll miss out on the messy, human work of collaboration, curiosity, disagreement and creation. And in a world increasingly shaped by machines, that may be the most important thing we can teach. The challenge isn't to beat AI at its own game. It's to make sure school stays human enough that students learn how to be human—together. Dustin Hornbeck, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies. His opinion does not represent that of the University for which he works. This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: AI is transforming education. We're struggling to keep up | Opinion
Axios
26-05-2025
- Axios
AI cheating surge pushes schools into chaos
High schools and colleges are stuck in limbo: Use of generative AI to cut corners and cheat is rampant, but there's no clear consensus on how to fight back. Why it matters: AI is here to stay, forcing educators to adapt. That means sussing out when students are using it — and avoiding the temptation of overusing it themselves. "I have to be a teacher and an AI detector at the same time," says Stephen Cicirelli, an English professor at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City, N.J. "[Any assignment] that you take home and have time to play around with, there's going to be doubt hanging over it." Cicirelli captured the zeitgeist with a viral post on X about how one of his students got caught submitting an AI-written paper — and apologized with an email that also appeared to be written by ChatGPT. "You're coming to me after to apologize and do the human thing and ask for grace," he says. "You're not even doing that yourself?" By the numbers: Use is ubiquitous in college. A survey of college students taken in January 2023, just two months after ChatGPT's launch, found that some 90% had already used it on assignments, New York Magazine reports. 1 in 4 13- to 17-year-olds say they use ChatGPT for help with schoolwork, per a recent Pew survey. That's double what it was in 2023. Driving the news: The proliferation of AI-assisted schoolwork is worrying academic leaders. 66% think generative AI will cut into students' attention spans, according to a survey of university presidents, chancellors, deans and more from the American Association of Colleges & Universities and Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center. 59% say cheating has increased on campus. 56% say their schools aren't ready to prepare students for the AI era. "It's an undeniable and unavoidable disruption," says Lee Rainie, director of Elon's digital future center. "You can't avert your eyes." One big snag: Teachers can't agree on what's acceptable in this new world. For example, 51% of higher education leaders say it's fine for a student to write a paper off a detailed outline generated by AI, while the rest say it's not or they don't know, per the AAC&U and Elon survey. Policies vary from classroom to classroom within the same school. Plus, the rise of AI is causing unforeseen headaches. Teachers run assignments through detectors, which often don't get it right, either missing AI-generated work or mistakenly flagging original work as written by AI. Students who didn't use AI have had to appeal to their schools or submit proof of their process to avoid getting zeroes, The New York Times reports. Instructors are getting caught leaning on ChatGPT, too. One Northeastern senior demanded tuition reimbursement after discovering her professor had used AI to prep lecture notes and slides, according to The New York Times. The other side: As much as they're struggling to wrangle AI use, many educators believe it has the potential to help students — and that schools should be teaching them how to use it. American University's business school is launching an AI institute for just that purpose. "When 18-year-olds show up here as first-years, we ask them, 'How many of your high school teachers told you not to use AI?' And most of them raise their hand," David Marchick, the dean of American University's Kogod School of Business, told Axios' Megan Morrone. "We say, 'Here, you're using AI, starting today.'" ChatGPT can be a real-time editor and refine students' writing or speed up research so they can focus on organizing big ideas instead of information gathering, Jeanne Beatrix Law, an English professor at Kennesaw State University, writes in The Conversation. "Don't block AI ... Instead, let's put in place some of the same safety and wellness protocols that it took us a decade to build for social media and web 1.0," says Tammy Wincup, CEO of Securly, a software company that builds safety tools for K-12 schools. What to watch: "There is a gigantic question across academic institutions right now," Rainie tells Axios. "How do you assess mastery?" Cicirelli says he's asking students to draft their work in Google Docs so he can see the brainstorming and writing process.
Int'l Business Times
20-05-2025
- Int'l Business Times
ZeroGPT Explained: A Simple Tool for Detecting AI-Generated Text
With AI-generated content becoming more common, it's getting harder to tell if something was written by a human or a machine. This is where ZeroGPT comes in. ZeroGPT is an AI detector tool designed to identify whether a piece of text was written by a human or generated by artificial intelligence. Whether you're a teacher, employer, content creator, or student, ZeroGPT helps you keep things transparent and trustworthy. ZeroGPT stands out because of its simplicity and accessibility. It doesn't require registration, offers quick results, and gives detailed sentence-by-sentence feedback. The tool was developed by a team of AI researchers and developers who saw a growing need to detect and differentiate machine-written content from human-generated work. Understanding the Need for AI Detection Tools The rise of ChatGPT, Jasper, and other AI writing tools has opened up many opportunities but also raised new concerns. In schools, AI use can blur the lines of academic integrity. In the workplace, it may affect credibility, especially in reports or creative work. In digital marketing and blogging, it can risk SEO penalties for content that feels too robotic or generic. Educators, recruiters, journalists, and editors now face a growing challenge: how to verify that submitted content was written by a human. That's why AI detectors are quickly becoming a regular part of the content vetting process. The Solution: ZeroGPT to the Rescue ZeroGPT provides a fast and user-friendly way to check if content might be AI-generated. In a time when schools, clients, and search engines are paying closer attention to how content is created, this tool offers a simple fix. Just paste your text into the box, hit "Detect," and the tool does the rest within seconds—no sign-up, no hassle. It's also helpful to use a word counter alongside it, especially for students and writers keeping track of length while reviewing content quality. Here are the standout features that make ZeroGPT such a practical solution: AI Content Detection Score : Shows a percentage indicating how likely the content was written by AI, helping users quickly judge the overall risk. : Shows a percentage indicating how likely the content was written by AI, helping users quickly judge the overall risk. Sentence-Level Detection : Instead of just labeling the whole text, it points out which specific sentences seem AI-written, giving clearer insights for editing. : Instead of just labeling the whole text, it points out which specific sentences seem AI-written, giving clearer insights for editing. No Login Required : You don't need to create an account or share your email—just open the site and use the tool. : You don't need to create an account or share your email—just open the site and use the tool. Multi-Language Support: It's not limited to English. You can check the content in several other languages, which is helpful for international users. Whether you're a student checking your paper, a freelancer reviewing a client's draft, or a marketer prepping a campaign, ZeroGPT makes sure your words stay human. Pros and Cons of Using ZeroGPT Why People Like It ZeroGPT stands out for its convenience and reliability. Many users find it helpful for day-to-day content checking because of the following benefits: Fast Results : It analyzes and returns detection results in seconds, making it ideal for quick reviews. : It analyzes and returns detection results in seconds, making it ideal for quick reviews. Free Version Available : You can use the tool without creating an account or paying, which makes it accessible for students, bloggers, and casual users. : You can use the tool without creating an account or paying, which makes it accessible for students, bloggers, and casual users. Simple Interface : No technical skills are required. The platform is clean and easy to navigate—just paste your text, click "Detect," and you're good to go. : No technical skills are required. The platform is clean and easy to navigate—just paste your text, click and you're good to go. Continuous Updates: The developers are constantly improving the tool to keep up with new AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini. This means better accuracy over time. Some Limitations to Know No AI detector is flawless, and ZeroGPT is no exception. Here are a few things to keep in mind: May Misidentify Human Text : Occasionally, it flags real human writing as AI-generated, especially if the text is highly structured or uses formal language. : Occasionally, it flags real human writing as AI-generated, especially if the text is highly structured or uses formal language. Better with Long Texts : Short paragraphs may not provide enough data for the tool to analyze accurately. It's best used for longer content. : Short paragraphs may not provide enough data for the tool to analyze accurately. It's best used for longer content. Fewer Features in Free Version: While the free tool is helpful, some advanced options like sentence-by-sentence breakdowns and in-depth reports are reserved for premium users. Despite these minor drawbacks, ZeroGPT remains a reliable and user-friendly tool for detecting AI-generated content. What Sets ZeroGPT Apart There are plenty of AI detection tools available online, but ZeroGPT stands out because it removes many of the usual barriers. It's built for everyday users who want fast, no-hassle results without needing a background in tech or content moderation. Here's what gives ZeroGPT an edge: No Signup Needed : You can use ZeroGPT right away—no account creation, no email confirmation, and no waiting around. This makes it a quick go-to tool, especially for people who only need a simple check. : You can use ZeroGPT right away—no account creation, no email confirmation, and no waiting around. This makes it a quick go-to tool, especially for people who only need a simple check. Detailed Breakdown : Most tools stop at a single "AI vs. human" score, but ZeroGPT goes a step further by giving you a sentence-level analysis . This helps users see exactly which parts of the text may seem AI-generated. : Most tools stop at a single score, but ZeroGPT goes a step further by giving you a . This helps users see exactly which parts of the text may seem AI-generated. Lighter, Cleaner Interface: Some platforms are loaded with ads, pop-ups, or cluttered menus. ZeroGPT keeps it clean, minimal, and fast—perfect for users who just want answers without distraction. These features make ZeroGPT more approachable and less intimidating than some of its competitors. It's a practical choice for students, bloggers, freelancers, and anyone else who needs to check text without extra steps. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Is ZeroGPT 100% accurate? No AI detector is perfect. ZeroGPT offers strong accuracy compared to many free tools, but it still isn't foolproof. Results should be used as a helpful guide—not as the final verdict. It's always smart to combine the results with your own judgment, especially for important content. Can it detect AI content from any platform? ZeroGPT is designed to identify writing patterns from major AI models like ChatGPT and similar tools. It does well with common types of AI-generated text. However, it may not catch everything, especially if the content comes from new or less mainstream AI systems. Still, it's reliable for most use cases. Do I need to download anything? Not at all. ZeroGPT is entirely web-based. You just go to the site, paste your text, and get instant feedback. No installations or sign-ups required. Will it store or track my text? According to the developers, ZeroGPT does not store your input. The text you paste is processed temporarily for analysis, but nothing is saved, making it a safer choice for checking sensitive or private content. Is there a mobile version? ZeroGPT works on mobile browsers, so you can use it from your phone or tablet. However, there isn't a dedicated app just yet. Extra Tools and Promotional Materials While the core feature is the online detection tool, ZeroGPT also offers: Chrome Extension (Coming Soon) : Makes checking content even easier while browsing. : Makes checking content even easier while browsing. Premium Features : For those who want deeper reports, including batch checking or historical logs. : For those who want deeper reports, including batch checking or historical logs. Official Guides and Tutorials: Available on their site to help users understand how to make the most of the results. Conclusion AI is changing how we write, learn, and work—but it shouldn't blur the lines of originality. Whether you're a teacher checking for plagiarism, a writer reviewing your draft, or a recruiter reading a cover letter, knowing the source of the content matters. ZeroGPT offers a quick, free, and human-friendly solution to help with that. If you're hesitant about trying it, remember: there's nothing to lose. No signups, no cost, and no tracking. To recap: It helps detect AI-generated content in seconds. It breaks down the analysis sentence by sentence. It's free, easy to use, and continuously updated. If you're creating or evaluating content in 2025, ZeroGPT is one tool you'll want to have in your digital toolkit.
