Good News and Bad News for AI

AI programs such as chatGPT have made detection of machine-written essays difficult. As blog readers will know, standard plagiarism detectors don't work and ones supposedly designed for AI have such high error rates as to render them useless.

One suggestion has been to use hand-written essays. The Good News is that the governor has signed a bill making cursive writing mandatory in California schools. From ABC-7 KGO:

...Governor Newsom signed a bill that will require cursive instruction in first through sixth grade... As artificial intelligence becomes a factor, handwritten essays may be something to consider...

But now the Bad News from the same article. You may have to wait to require such essays:

...Abigail Soriano-Lentz is the English Language Arts Curriculum Coordinator for the East Side Union High School District... Now that AB 446 has been signed, learning cursive is going to be new for students and for some teachers. "For thirteen years our teacher education programs have said cursive is not part of the standards so we have quite a chunk of teachers who have not taught it and who haven't needed to teach it and some who probably were not taught it themselves," Soriano-Lentz said.

At the high school level, Soriano-Letz said there's a mix of students who can and cannot read and write in cursive...

Full story at https://abc7.com/cursive-california-schools-governor-newsom-teaching-handwriting/13926546/.

The bill is at https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB446/id/2743420.