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Time for the weekend long read suggestions and first up, this is straight up the wildest story I've read about AI to date. We know that AI is potentially great for doing scams, right? Especially for aping actual humans. When doing that scamming well, get this. U.S. community colleges are suddenly battling a flood of fake or BOT students who bilk financial aid by enrolling in online or REMOT classes and then submitting AI generated coursework. Quoting Voice of San Diego Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors. The bot's goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes and remaining enrolled in them long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they've been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud that has put teachers on the front lines of an ever evolving war on fraud, muddied the teaching experience and thrown up significant barriers to students ability to access courses. What has made the situation all the more difficult, some teachers say, is the feeling that administrators haven't done enough to curb the cris. Colleges first started seeing bots managed by fraud rings invade classes around 2021. Those bots seem to generally be real people managing networks of fake student aliases. The more they manage, the more financial aid money they can potentially steal. Four years later, there are no clear signs it's slowing down. During 2024 alone, fraudulent students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars, more than double what was stolen the prior year. Year. Last year, the state chancellor's office estimated 25% of community college applicants were bots. Despite the eye popping sum, state leaders are quick to point out that amounts to a fraction of the around $3.2 billion combined state and federal financial aid dispersed last year. But for many community college teachers, particularly those who teach online courses, the influx of BOT students has changed what it means to be a teacher, said Eric Mag, who has taught at Southwestern for 21 years. We didn't used to have to decide if our students were human. They were all people. But now there's this skepticism because a growing number of people we're teaching are not real. We're having to have these conversations with students like are you real? Is your work real? Mag said. It's really complicated, the relationship between the teacher and the student. In almost like a fundamental way. Those teacher led investigations have become more difficult over the years, professors say. While some bots simply don't submit classwork and hope they can skate by. They also frequently use AI programs to generate classwork that they then submit. Determining whether a student is a bot can be a confusing task. After all, even real students use AI to do some good old fashioned cheating in classes. There are some patterns, though. Asynchronous online courses tend to be the heaviest hit. So are classes with large sizes and shorter term courses like those that run for only eight weeks. Some teachers also said classes whose names start with letters at the beginning of the Alphabet are harder hit as well. The time spent doing Blade Runner esque bot detection has also stretched professors thin, said Kerry Language, a counselor and the president of Southwestern College's Academic Senate. It's really hard to create a sense of community and help students who are struggling when you're spending the first couple weeks trying to figure out who's a bot, she said. Finding the fraudulent students early is key, though. If they can be identified and dropped before the third week of the semester, when Southwestern distributes aid funds, the bots don't get the money they're after. It also allows professors to open the seats held by scammers to real students who are crowded out. But dropping huge amounts of enrollees can also be frightening to teachers who worry that should their classes not fill back up, they may be axed. Even after dropping the fraudulent students, though, the bot nightmare isn't over. As soon as seats open up in classes, professors often receive hundreds of nearly identical emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class. Those emails tended to ring some linguistic alarm bells. They feature clunky phrases that are uncommon for modern students to use, like I kindly request or Warm regards or I look forward to your positive response. Much of that stilted language lines up with what has been seen from the AI generated content submitted by Bot Studio. That mad bot powered dash for enrollment has left some students unable to register for the classes they need. It has also given rise to a sort of whisper network where professors recommend students reference them by name when trying to get added to other classes. Finally, this week, longtime listeners will know my longtime fascination with the Fermi paradox. In a different, maybe more ideal timeline, I'd be the host of a podcast devoted to nothing other than debating solutions to the Fermi paradox. Well, from my literal Fermi Paradox, Google Alert scientists have found the strongest signal yet that could indicate life on another planet. Quoting the New York times while inspecting K2 18B, Dr. Madhusadan and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported that they had also detected faint hints of another molecule and one of huge potential importance, dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon and hydrogen. On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life in the ocean. For instance, certain forms of algae produce the compound, which wafts into the air and adds to the sea's distinctive odor. Long before the Webb Telescope was launched, astrobiologists had wondered whether dimethyl sulfide might serve as a sign of life on other planets planets last year, Dr. Matt Hussudan and his colleagues got a second chance to look for dimethyl sulfide as K2 18B orbited in front of its star. They used a different instrument on the Webb Telescope to analyze the starlight passing through the planet's atmosphere. This time they saw an even stronger signal of dimethyl sulfide, along with a similar molecule called dimethyl disulfide. It's a shock to the system, Dr. Matt Hussein said. We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal. But no matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal strong. They concluded that K2.18B may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth. This would suggest that its hycean seas are brimming with life. Now obviously there are still questions to answer around all this and plenty of doubts and doubters as well. Otherwise this would be a much bigger news headline, but still fun for folks like me who geek out over this stuff. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend for obvious reasons. In fact, as I think I told you, we've already gotten 6 to 8 inches of snow this morning where we are on this side of the mountain on Czech's calendar April 18. We believe and hope we will be able to get safely down the mountain to the Denver Airport tomorrow afternoon and won't be snowed in all weekend. But who knows, maybe I'll be coming to you again from the side of this mountain on Monday. Hopefully not talk to you then.

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