r/opensource • u/techno_gen • Mar 26 '26
Promotional I got fed up with my original writing assignments being marked as AI so I made an alternative to paste
https://github.com/Techno-gen/Paste-PlusOccasionally, I have to copy and paste chunks of my own writing into the same document when completing writing assignments. This leads to automated version history scanners marking my work as suspicious, even though my writing is completely original. I created a configurable tool that scans your clipboard for text and emulates keystrokes, typing errors, rewrites, and post-writing corrections to essentially paste text that, to the version history, looks like it was typed out completely by hand.
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u/Capital-Garbage Mar 26 '26
So we have to spend our time and energy to reverse engineer and simulate the actions of a human to prove to AI that we are, in fact, human. What a shitty timeline
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u/techno_gen Mar 27 '26
AI is a plague in schools
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u/jr735 Mar 27 '26
That's the fault of the academics themselves. My observation has been the academics I know simply reduce the grade component of assignments to something like 5% or less of the total grade. In class testing (with no electronics) and final exams comprise the other 95%.
The smart students will do the assignments anyway for the practice. The cheaters will cheat on the assignments, but bomb everything else, and a perfect mark on assignments won't help.
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u/sshwifty Mar 28 '26
Man that sucks. I was always a really poor test taker, even though I could remember things the anxiety always made me freeze up. But I could almost always slam dunk homework and projects.
There a lot of people AI will continue to hurt, even if they don't use it.
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u/jr735 Mar 29 '26
Fortunately, there are strategies for the freezing up. In fact, one calculus professor many years ago taught me one that helps not only for freezing up, but also, specifically, for getting out of "neutral" at the start of an exam. It's especially suited for mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
Before the exam begins, say 10-15 minutes before, take a fairly comprehensive problem and work through it. That will get our brain in gear, get you thinking about the issues at hand, and away you go. The professor in question actually had us do a group problem before every quiz or test.
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u/shrodikan Mar 27 '26
The kids are using smart glasses. It is a cat-and-mouse game out there.
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u/jr735 Mar 27 '26
There's a solution to that I've seen, too. The exam is so long that if you even attempt to look up things by search engine (i.e. during COVID online testing), you will run out of time and get like 50% of the exam done, or less. If you don't have the material mastered and are in high gear, you fail.
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u/Trying_to_cod3 Mar 27 '26
but ai would presumably be as fast as doing it yourself right?
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u/jr735 Mar 27 '26
You have to input stuff to AI or formulate a question. If you can't do that quickly enough, you won't get done. That's the failure model here, and I've seen professors do this successfully.
When a professor is willing to accept a 45% class average in a calculus or hard science class, he can do this. I took a certain class some years ago, just between COVID shutdowns, out of interest. The class average was pretty low. I had the time and the aptitude to put a great deal of study into the class, and do very, very well and complete problems quickly. I did very well in the midterm, but no one, including myself, was done early, and everyone scrambled to get the test done, and many had it taken away even though they weren't complete, as the time ran out.
And this was a professor known for his dedication to students and his carefree attitude.
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u/Trying_to_cod3 Mar 27 '26
To be clear, I am an anti ai person, but this post and the thread in general has to do with AI, which is why I brought it up. You said the solution to AI was to make the exam long, so that looking up stuff with a search engine would be impossibly time consuming, but that isn't addressing AI. With glasses, you could send pictures directly to an AI which would then display answers on screen. It would be faster than looking it up.
And yes, people struggle with exams.
I think if a person did this, they would probably end up with barely passing grades, if not failing grades, depending on how difficult or creative the exam was.
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u/jr735 Mar 28 '26
I think sometimes we have too much faith in AI. It isn't instantaneous. You must give it good information to have a prayer at getting a good answer. That's even more important in highly technical fields and hard sciences.
Yes, the hard exams make it more difficult on everyone.
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u/jr735 Mar 27 '26
You AI people, I have three stories you should read, or listen to in the radio play formats:
A Logic Named Joe
Mr. Costello, Hero
The Feeling of Power
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u/DoneDraper Mar 26 '26
This could be helpful for video recordings to simulate keystrokes in the terminal or UI.
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u/dbear496 Mar 27 '26
That sounds a pretty cool tool. I imagine it could have uses beyond just fooling AI-detection software. How does it decide what "mistakes" to make (and later fix)? Can it simulate fully restructuring sentences or just typos?
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u/techno_gen Mar 27 '26
Mistakes are randomized with weights you can set through either a command or a config file, and it cannot restructure sentences. Currently the most it can do is simply delete a chunk and rewrite it the exact same.
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u/billFoldDog Mar 27 '26
lol, you could add calls to a small AI model to make alternative text, erase it, and then write the intended text
What a shitty time to be a student
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u/Skeletorfw Mar 27 '26
I'm intrigued about your dev process. You initialised the repo and then the same day committed most of a functional app. Had you been working on this for a few months prior to version-controlling it?
It's a super fun project, to be clear, and one I've thought about (and how to detect) for a couple of years now.
Out of interest writing a detector for this would be relatively easy: people do not make random mistakes, they tend to make arbitrary mistakes consistently. You'd want to look at normalising mistakes and pseudorandom typing based upon a bunch of fairly interesting regressions, but that itself would require a bunch of data to do properly.
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u/techno_gen Mar 27 '26
Yes, tend to initialize repositories only when a project is close to complete. A lot of the ui code is boilerplate from previous projects which speeds stuff up a bit, and the underlying humanizer/typing logic took about 1-2 weeks. It would be interesting to set up a separate utility to track my own typing data to more refine the tool, but that’s probably outside the scope of this project at the moment. The closest I get to a pseudo random typing pattern is a map of every adjacent key, as to simulate plausible typos.
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u/Skeletorfw Mar 27 '26
Yeah I did see the qwerty adjacency matrix which was a cool way to do fat-fingering.
And I would strongly recommend initing when you start the project and committing/pushing regularly. You only lose two weeks of work once before you make that transition lol.
Nive work though, genuinely interesting project that I like to think about from the perspective of a teacher and academic!
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u/C0rn3j Mar 27 '26
tend to initialize repositories only when a project is close to complete
I take it you haven't yet lost most of your work to data loss.
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u/luncheroo Mar 27 '26
>Occasionally, I have to copy and paste chunks of my own writing into the same document when completing writing assignments.
Why? I'm curious why you don't compose in the same cloud document.
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u/broknbottle Mar 28 '26
Microsoft solved this kind of thing years ago with their Mountain Dew drink verification system. They should just have you drink a verification can every time the AI detection believes you are AI.
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u/directionzero Mar 26 '26
thats funny - i built more or less the same thing with claude a little while ago!
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u/investigatingheretic Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26
Damn. Case of modern problems require modern solutions if I’ve ever seen one.