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.
That’s more a matter of 95% of people not even knowing how to type a ‘–’ with their standard keyboard layout.
I’ve heard a teacher using that as a test to see which students are using AI: If the student turn in a report full of em-dashes, then the teacher would put them in front of a laptop running Word and asks “can you please show me how you type those long dashes that you used all over your report?”
If they can’t do it, then their report is considered AI-generated or plagiarism (which are considered equivalent by the school). If they could do it they would get the benefit of the doubt, but when I heard it he hadn’t had a single student pass that test yet.
It’s a better and likely far more accurate test than those complete bullshit “AI detectors”.
How would that test work more than once per student though
Exactly the point.
I run teacher training on this stuff, and that’s always a core part of the message: education is about relationships. Damaging your relationship with a student over an accusation of AI use is backwards; instead, come with curiosity.
Also, AI writes poorly, so you don’t even need to call them out on it. And then when they (inevitably) include a source or fact hallucination, return the paper and explain that the error needs to be fixed, and why. That’s your “in” to explain ethical use of AI.
Word processors (like MS Word) have been doing it automatically since I was in school. Same with double spacing after a period.
In my experience that is in fact more of a MS Word feature (and very inconsistent at it) than a general word processor feature. But maybe I’m underestimating the impact on “average texts” simply because my use of MS products is far below average.
I doubt the average student is using anything other than Word, unless they are using AI to begin with.
Which is great for one application, but two spaces after each period would be hell to edit down to AP Style.
I mean, Ctrl+H and switching two spaces to one is easily doable, but that’s not where I want to start the editing process.
I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.
I don’t get that, I’ve always used them, long before AI was a thing.