The Conversation: “As the “chatbot wars” rage in Silicon Valley, the growing proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools specifically designed to generate human-like text has left many baffled. Educators in particular are scrambling to adjust to the availability of software that can produce a moderately competent essay on any topic at a moment’s notice. Should we go back to pen-and-paper assessments? Increasing exam supervision? Ban the use of AI entirely? All these and more have been proposed. However, none of these less-than-ideal measures would be needed if educators could reliably distinguish AI-generated and human-written text. We dug into several proposed methods and tools for recognising AI-generated text. None of them are foolproof, all of them are vulnerable to workarounds, and it’s unlikely they will ever be as reliable as we’d like…”