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.
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.