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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.

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[-] its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 4 points 17 hours ago

In my in person classes I used contract grading and weighed in class participation and case studies at 75% of their contract. The final was optional and was from a list of possible choices. I'd focus on providing mentorship and feedback, not grading them, simulating real world growth and learning. I had no AI problems and both I and my students generally loved it.

I taught one online class. It sucked. I hated it. Rampant AI and totally fabricated everything. Even reflection paragraph posts. I need to learn how to design an online class like my in person ones. Until then, never again.

Most of the AI users were student athletes. I can quantify this, so I'm not exagerating. They would miss classes for travel, turn in AI slop, and I would have to fail them over and over. That online class was 60% student athletes. I tried so hard to talk sense and be accommodating, but it was unabashed AI everything. It was bad.

The student athletes are getting more screwed than normal because they are just faking it through college and getting exploited by the NCAA for money.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 4 points 17 hours ago

Having been the managing editor of my school paper, I'm not surprised. Athletes got away with all sorts of shit even before AI.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 4 points 23 hours ago

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.

[-] Infinite@lemmy.zip 4 points 22 hours ago

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.

[-] its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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.

[-] CandleTiger@programming.dev 2 points 14 hours ago

I'm telling you there are teachers out there who are amazing because they approach teaching without regurgitation and grade based progress.

And you have to tell us that, because mostly we haven’t seen such teachers and wouldn’t otherwise know they existed.

[-] its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org 4 points 11 hours ago

Which is a tragedy. Many reasons pertaining to why that is the exception.

[-] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Once again the school system of a country makes the life of children worse.

Just have an AI write it for them then but tell it to use simple words (specify [the grade of your kid]-1) and leave out a comma or two, works like a charm every time.

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 78 points 2 days ago

This is why I love hearing large businesses complain about all the fake low effort job applications they get with AI as if this wasn't the inevitable end state of fakeness and inauthentic corporate language they have been pushing for decades.

[-] voxthefox@lemmy.blahaj.zone 52 points 2 days ago

As if that same job posting wasn't itself likely written with AI lol

[-] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 25 points 2 days ago

HEY HEY that is different ok!

[-] brisk@aussie.zone 22 points 2 days ago

This predates the ai bubble. There used to be a really common "plagiarism detector" (something like CheckMeIn?] that would generate a "similarity score" with a database of literature. Institutions were welcome to set their own thresholds of what they considered too similar. I hit the threshold multiple times in completely original works by using language that was simply too literary or formal in nature.

Mind I had been accused of plagiarism by teachers prior to those tools for much the same reason based only on vibes, so maybe that was a step up, since students could use it ahead of time.

There was a news story around that time of somebody getting taken through disciplinary action due to getting close to 100% similarity on the tool - eventually to discover that their own essays had Venn included in the database.

[-] MetaStatistical@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago

This predates the ai bubble. There used to be a really common “plagiarism detector” (something like CheckMeIn?] that would generate a “similarity score” with a database of literature. Institutions were welcome to set their own thresholds of what they considered too similar. I hit the threshold multiple times in completely original works by using language that was simply too literary or formal in nature.

This is because all art are forms of remixing, whether it's intentional or not. We're teaching the wrong lessons here.

For many many centuries, art and artists, whether it's musicians, artists, actors, writers, essayists, whoever, they have been facing an uphill battle of oversaturation in each creative industry. It's only gotten worse in the past 50-75 years, and we're more exposed to the sheer numbers now. We are throwing a drop of water into an ocean and hoping people will notice.

Trying to use "plagiarism detectors" against databases of millions or billions of pages is about as pointless as accusing songwriters of plagiarizing songs based on four notes. There are only so many musically-useful combinations of four notes, and they have all been used. Adam Neely has been reporting on this garbage for years.

LLMs are just making the problem even more obvious: creativity is not unique, it is not unique to people, and people have been mentally trained to expect uniqueness so much that we purposely ignore 99.999% of the material that is offered to us. As such, only 0.0001% of the ones who create earn any sort of popularity, and the rest starve to death. We ourselves are starved for content, as we consume anything that fits our extremely narrow definition of creativity like the voracious vampires we are.

[-] millie@beehaw.org 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I feel like the idea that art is "remixing" is a bit of an imprecise explanation that often leads people to think that when artists create similar works they're basing the one on the other.

Take music as an example. Let's say you've got a standard 6-string guitar fretted for 12 tone even temperament. If you take one string and explore all the relationships between the notes, you're going to independently discover things about intervals, scales, and modes without necessarily learning any of the terminology, theory, or history associated with any particular cultural context. Your ear will show you that a major scale sounds one way and a minor scale sounds another without going into it knowing which is which. You'll notice that when you play 0, 2, 4, 5 it sounds uplifting, and when you play 0, 2, 3, 5 it can sound a little more sorrowful.

When you discover a double harmonic scale, it's going to naturally have elements that sound similar to the Mayamalavagowla raga and the Bhairav raga even if you have never heard a single note of Indian music. You didn't have to conjure up these elements to try to sound like music based on these ragas, because the elements are preexisting. You could play these scales on the other side of the galaxy with no knowledge of Earth and the mathematical relationships at play between the frequencies would remain.

The same is true of melodies within a scale. The intervals of notes push and pull in different directions and give a feeling of wanting to land somewhere while taking a route that feels right. If you play around with an E minor scale long enough, you're probably going to eventually play the first five notes in a way that sounds a lot like the chorus from "I Was Made For Lovin' You" just by playing around with runs. It doesn't matter if you've never heard the song or aren't aware of KISS, it's right there on the fretboard. Assuming that those notes coming out of your strings is specifically tied to one song or one band ignores the fact that whoever wrote that song also had to discover that arrangement of preexisting intervals on a preexisting scale. In this particular case it's just a run back and forth from 1-5, pretty simple. That also extends to other relationships between intervals, because the notes come with weight and an accompanying feeling that pushes them toward some sort of outcome.

I think for people who don't play an instrument, this isn't always intuitive. Part of the same hump that can make it difficult for someone to get into music in the first place can contribute to this outlook too. If they think they have to plan every note and aren't aware of the process of playing by feeling, it seems calculated rather than organic. You certainly can calculate every step, but playing music doesn't require it and neither do many other forms of art.

Obviously we also learn from the art around us, so it's not as though we're learning in a total vacuum. Part of why a note feels like it makes sense to go in a direction is because of learned context. Take Nirvana, for example. If you grew up on Nirvana, it may feel more obvious to include what might otherwise have been counterintuitive intervals that someone who's never listened to anything but 18th century Western European music might find jarring. Or more generally, if you are used to a musical tradition that's informed by blues somewhere in its history, you're probably more likely to have a positive visceral reaction to the use of blue notes in the right context.

But that still doesn't necessarily mean just xeroxing pieces of genres and slapping them together. It informs what you feel about your organic exploration of music. There may be elements that are explicitly and intentionally borrowed, but I don't think that's the primary reason we see these similarities.

Similarities exist because creating art is an organic process informed by physical law, our bodies, and the tools we use, and because the process is taking place on the same planet and often in the same or similar contexts as other pieces of art.

[-] lmmarsano@group.lt 25 points 2 days ago

I’m accused of being AI on other sites

Other sites? Happens here, too. The best answer is troll them by imitating AI.

[-] apotheotic@beehaw.org 1 points 14 hours ago

Its not just other sites


its here. Being accused of being an AI isn't a roadblock


that's a moment.

lul yeah. that dynamic alone is why I started working en dashes into my comments <3

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 7 points 1 day ago

I'm confident in my role here. I think I've gotten that accusation once, and it was quickly swatted back not by me, but rather people who'd seen my posts over the years.

[-] bilb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

This has, so far, only happened to me on Reddit.

[-] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 16 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Ooops@feddit.org 10 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] rimu@piefed.social 14 points 2 days ago

18% is nowhere near high enough to be throwing around accusations like that. Seems like the teachers don't know how to interpret the results.

The teachers didn't, the parents freaked out.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 7 points 1 day ago

My son has gone back to college in his late 20s, after having a lot more experience in everything, including writing. He's become an excellent writer, but he has expressed that he's worried that his younger peers are such bad writers, that the profs will think he must be using AI.

I just told him to keep talking in class, and they'll figure out real quick that he really is that smart, and they won't question his writing. That already seems to be happening.

It's when the dummy shows up with a well written paper out of the blue, that their red flags go up.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago

Standardization and automated processes will fix that

[-] Maeve@kbin.earth 6 points 2 days ago

I think that's a very intentional feature, brought by the techbros who urge kids to skip uni.

[-] Ooops@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago

– and use emdashes.

That's more a matter of 95% of people not even knowing how to type a '–' with their standard keyboard layout.

[-] ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago

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".

[-] dupelet_comments@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

How would that test work more than once per student though

[-] definitemaybe@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Kolanaki@pawb.social 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Word processors (like MS Word) have been doing it automatically since I was in school. Same with double spacing after a period.

[-] Ooops@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I doubt the average student is using anything other than Word, unless they are using AI to begin with.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

I don't get that, I've always used them, long before AI was a thing.

[-] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago

I realized recently that I enjoy reading peoples janky personal messages online. You know it's a real person. Or at least it probably is.

[-] Powderhorn@beehaw.org 3 points 2 days ago

I hope I've been sufficiently janky for you with my posts.

[-] Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago

Absolutely lol

[-] orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 days ago

I can't get Idiocracy out of my mind when I read this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw

this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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