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.
If I were still in school and running into this problem I’d be recording my text editor. Alternately, I do think you can use Google docs to look at edit history if you enable it when sharing a document. Fuck dumbing down your own writing. Put some em dashes in there and make them skim through a 4 hour video if they complain.
My understanding from a recent high school student is that they’re required to use Word online because it captures the stream of edits for their teacher.
You can still fake it. Have AI write the essay, you “write” a first draft and simulate edits here and there. You can also prompt AI to writer a first, second, and third draft and detail changes. Then you manually make them over time. Turn it in.
Look, this is a chance for teaching and grading to change. It needs to as the traditional methods which were failing from budget cuts, overuse of shit tools, etc, weren’t working. Put learning, not evaluation, in the classroom and you can avoid AI abuse. I am an N of 1, but I’m telling you there are teachers out there who are amazing because they approach teaching without regurgitation and grade based progress. AI thrives at both.
Go grab Frier, read pedagogy of the oppressed, and then start researching contract grading.
And you have to tell us that, because mostly we haven’t seen such teachers and wouldn’t otherwise know they existed.
Which is a tragedy. Many reasons pertaining to why that is the exception.