About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.
The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.
At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.
Turns out … I was not wrong.
I’m accused of being AI on other sites simply because I construct complex sentences with regularity – and use emdashes.
AI checkers seem like a stupid and lazy way to determine if a student used AI to write their paper when the teacher could simply sit down with the student to ask them about the content of their to paper.
AI checkers for text (but the same is true for the ones pretending to spot AI pictures and videos) also don’t work by definition.
The AI tries to make it’s "product’ perfect. It does not have the ability to spot its own mistakes and telltale signs, or it wouldn’t make them in the first place.
So every AI check is actually cheating. In pictures and videos with hidden watermarks, in text with typical clues like the mentioned ‘–’ or vocabulary more prevalent in AI texts that the average human work.