Students cannot reliably distinguish AI-generated slides from human-created slides¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r1 · q2
Currency · no dated study recorded · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Students' human-vs-AI guesses did not differ between AI and human slides (median guess 4.0 for both). → anchor-guess

Evidence¶

anchor-guess¶

Juho Leinonen, Lisa Zhang, and Arto Hellas. 2026. AI-Generated Slides: Are They Good? Can Students Tell?. In Proceedings of Western Canada Conference on Computing Education 2026 (WCCCE 2026). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13532 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2605.13532

q2 · i? · causal · r1

Same in-class survey: after each lecture segment students guessed on a 7-point scale whether slides were AI- or human-made, uninformed about which segments were AI; "the median for the guesses for both AI and human slides was 4.0", U = 28171.5, p = 0.1.

"While the median for the guesses for both AI and human slides was 4.0, students seemed not to be able to guess the source (AI vs. human) of the slides based on the Mann-Whitney U test results (U = 28171.5, p = 0.1)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Students associate poor slide quality with AI as the source: perceived quality correlates negatively with AI-source guesses — related
• Students rated AI-generated and instructor-created lecture slides as similar in quality in a real course — related
• Educators struggled to reliably differentiate student-written from GenAI-generated reflections — a broader claim this one bears on
• AI-generated text can pass as human-authored in up to 80% of cases, making reliable differentiation a significant challenge — related
• In a human Turing test, participants could not reliably distinguish BEAGLE traces from real student data (52.8% accuracy; d′ = 0.15 within the ±0.3 equivalence bound, pTOST = 0.038) — related
• AI agent activity in an LMS is indistinguishable from normal student activity, defeating detection and proctoring — related