Here Come the AI-Powered Bot Students - Daily Nous

“We didn’t use to have to decide if our students were human, they were all people. But now there’s this skepticism because a growing number of the people we’re teaching are not real. We’re having to have these conversations with students, like, ‘Are you real? Is your work real?’”

That’s Eric Maag, professor of communication at Southwestern College in California.

You’ve been worried that your students have been using ChatGPT and other LLMs to cheat? Hahaha. How quaint. Time for an update. Here’s something new for you to worry about: criminal enterprises managing networks of AI-powered bots to impersonate students for the purposes of stealing financial aid.

The idea, reports The Voice of San Diego, is to use a tech-enabled form of identity theft “to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them long enough for aid disbursements to go out.”

In California in 2024, criminals were able to rake in about $11 million with this scheme.

Apparently the problem of such “ghost students” grew tremendously with the turn to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. But new AI technologies are making these fakes harder to detect, because the bots are better equipped to communicate and submit work.

Reportedly, community colleges tend to be hit the hardest with this problem, since they accept most applicants. The Voice reports that an estimated 25% of community college applicants in California were bots.

The burden of detecting such students seems to have been largely placed on the shoulders of faculty. Apparently it is not an easy problem to deal with.

Reports The Voice:

Finding the fraudulent students early is key, though. If they can be identified and dropped before the third week of the semester, when Southwestern distributes aid funds, the bots don’t get the money they’re after. It also allows professors to open the seats held by scammers to real students who were crowded out. But dropping huge amounts of enrollees can also be frightening to teachers, who worry that should their classes not fill back up, they may be axed.  

Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn’t over.  

As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class…. 

Exactly what colleges like Southwestern will do long-term isn’t entirely clear, at least partly because what they do will have to keep changing. The bots, like the AI technology that often undergirds them, are constantly evolving, leaving some leaders feeling like they’re playing a high stakes game of whack-a-mole. 

You can read more about the issue here. Discussion welcome, especially from those who have had to deal with this problem.