There’s no simple solution to universities’ AI worries

‘We need to think carefully about how we are going to assess work, when at a click almost limitless superficially plausible text can be produced.’ Photograph: Alamy

I enjoyed the letter from Dr Craig Reeves (17 June) in which he argues that higher education institutions are consciously choosing not to address widespread cheating using generative AI so as not to sacrifice revenues from international students. He is right that international students are propping up the UK’s universities, of which more than two-fifths will be in deficit by the end of this academic year. But it is untrue that universities could simply spot AI cheating if they wanted to. Dr Reeves says that they should use AI detectors, but the studies that he quotes rebut this argument.

The last study he cites (Perkins et al, 2024) shows that AI detectors were accurate in fewer than 40% of cases, and that this fell to just 22% of “adversarial” cases – when the use of AI was deliberately obscured. In other words, AI detectors failed to spot that AI had been used three‑quarters of the time.