ai and ml<\/p>\n
Startup insists it’s not trying to help anyone cheat the system – honest!<\/p>\n
It’s bad enough that you used AI to write a research paper instead of composing it yourself. Now, you can take the extra step to hide the evidence of your sloth. A startup has decided academics need a way to hide LLM tells, yet they insist their goal isn\u2019t to support bad habits among boffins.\u00a0<\/p>\n
AI humanizers are nothing new – take a cursory look online and you\u2019ll find that companies pushing AI that helps AI writing sound less like AI wrote it are a dime a dozen. None, says the team behind Academic Humanizer<\/a>, have been specifically tailored to papers and grant proposals. Thankfully for the world\u2019s lazy academics unwilling to actually do their jobs, that\u2019s now changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem is that AI-assisted drafts come out generic and verbose, with \u2026 inflated phrasing, and over-long sentences,\u201d University of Minnesota associate professor and cofounder of MorphMind, the company behind the tool, Jie Ding, wrote in its GitHub readme. \u201cThey also drift from the author’s own voice and lose the precision scholarship depends on.\u201d<\/p>\n A previous version of that statement, written prior to a recent readme update, lays the point of the tool bare. Academic Humanizer, the opening of the readme read<\/a> until an update five days ago, is designed to \u201cstrip the tells of AI writing from papers and grant proposals, without flattening the precise, evidence-bound voice scholarship requires.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The GitHub repo includes several examples of text run through the humanizer for those who want to see what it\u2019s actually capable of.\u00a0<\/p>\n Academic Humanizer is, at its core, just a Claude skill<\/a>, so it\u2019s using more AI to correct the problems introduced into the academic writing space by AI. To further make its generative utterances more lifelike, Academic Humanizer can be pointed directly at its user\u2019s prior work so that it\u2019ll sound more like the \u201cauthor\u201d of the new paper instead of a bot.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the GitHub repo and Ding both point out, the Humanizer is designed to rewrite AI-assisted drafts rather than generate new content, so it isn’t supposed to pile more AI slop onto an already AI-generated draft.<\/p>\n \u201cAcademic Humanizer is a writing-clarity tool to help researchers express their own ideas more precisely. It is not designed to generate novel content or circumvent review,\u201d Ding told The Register in an email. The readme further warns users that Academic Humanizer doesn\u2019t remove their obligation to disclose that AI helped them write a paper, or wrote it in its entirety.<\/p>\n But if the tool isn’t capable of generating findings, inventing data, or changing citations, instead serving only as “an editing aid for clarity and voice,” what does that mean for weak or error-prone material in the original AI-generated draft? It probably means that while the tool may tighten prose, it isn’t intended to verify the underlying arguments or evidence. Weak content may simply end up sounding more convincingly human – not a great prospect for an industry already drowning in AI-generated slop.<\/p>\n Academics at The University of Surrey warned<\/a> last year that they were being inundated by \u201cformulaic research articles\u201d with \u201csuperficial and oversimplified \u2026 analysis\u201d that were obviously crafted by large language models. The problem has even reached the AI research space itself, where last month AI output detector GPTZero said it\u00a0found<\/a> 100 hallucinated references across 51 papers accepted by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t bode well for academic integrity, already imperiled<\/a> by the growing use of AI in higher education and academia, nor does it bode well for the quality of college graduates, either. According to MIT, students who use AI to write essays and papers have less brain activity than those who forego the tools, leading to poorer retention and less actual learning<\/a>.<\/p>\n But sure, let\u2019s create a tool to make AI writing sound more human – that\u2019s definitely the right approach to take in this situation. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ai and ml Startup insists it’s not trying to help anyone cheat the system – honest! 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