Accusations and AI

Writing is relative, and objectively good pieces are hard to find these days. With the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to copy and paste something a computer thought of while claiming it as your own without an ounce of credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, for many people (such as myself) who strive to use formal language and correct punctuation as needed, this means that teachers have lost all faith in students’ abilities to write a comprehensible essay or assignment. The first thing they think of when met with a genuinely articulate piece of writing is to ask themselves, “Is this AI?”

To be fair, most of the time, it is AI. Students have become so reliant on chatbots like ChatGPT and the like to complete their tasks, they have no reason to do anything themselves anymore. Without a thought, they upload their work and let the program do the rest. Most don’t try to do anything else.

Because of this, teachers have become desensitized to misappropriated works and automatically assume a well-placed comma or, more notably, a suspicious em dash are products of plagiarism. What this means for people who do write their own papers are false accusations and heated discussions about the decline in students’ work ethic, with a rising demand for teachers to reconsider using AI plagiarism checkers that label 100% human writing as 100% anything but.

I am not exempt from this mass scrutiny—multiple times, especially during freshman year, I’ve been asked the same question repeatedly: “Are you sure you wrote this?”

It was hard to feel anything but offended and concerned why any teacher would ask that. None would seem to care that I’d been writing as such for longer than my high school career. Perhaps, it’s been a while since they have encountered truthful writing that doesn’t leech off of computer-generated responses. However, the conversation about the increase of dependency on AI is not one many are ready to have.

Obviously, this type of academic dishonesty should never be condoned, but there should be measures in place to prevent false allegations being made and potentially hurting someone’s reputation. It can only be imagined what such a charge could do to a senior student applying to college who was accused of using AI in their application essay; the damage would be irrevocable.

For the over-achieving student, a claim like this is their worst nightmare, and so is it for the student who actually did use AI. What doesn’t make sense is that they both get punished for the same thing. At the end of the day, we are starting to lose our sense of self and humanity to AI, and every single person who continues to use it makes it an even bigger problem that plagues our education system and our youth.