Automatic BS Essay Generator Beats Automatic Grading
"Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent," he reads. "Humankind will always subjugate privateness."
The Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language Generator (Babel), which Mr. Perelman built with a team of students from MIT and Harvard University, can generate essays from scratch using as many as three keywords.
For this essay, Mr. Perelman has entered only one keyword: "privacy." With the click of a button, the program produced a string of bloated sentences that, though grammatically correct and structurally sound, have no coherent meaning. Not to humans, anyway. But Mr. Perelman is not trying to impress humans. He is trying to fool machines.
Now, here in the office, Mr. Perelman copies the nonsensical text of the "privateness" essay and opens MY Access!, an online writing-instruction product that uses the same essay-scoring technology that the Graduate Management Admission Test employs as a second reader. He pastes the nonsense essay into the answer field and clicks "submit."
Immediately the score appears on the screen: 5.4 points out of 6, with "advanced" ratings for "focus and meaning" and "language use and style."
The edX software tries to make its machine graders more human. Rather than simply scoring essays according to a standard rubric, the EASE software can mimic the grading styles of particular professors.
The Babel Generator has fooled the edX software too, he says, suggesting that even artificially intelligent machines are not necessarily intelligent enough to recognize gibberish.
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education