With AI taking over today’s tech landscape, it’s becoming harder and even sometimes impossible to tell whether something was created by an actual person. Even the generated art that people prompt up these days can be quite convincing. But with the AI craze also comes the suspicion that anyone and everyone could be using AI, and that’s exactly what one professor from the University of California, Riverside accused one student of. She was so sure of it, in fact, that she gave the student a failing grade for a writing assignment, giving them a score of 0.
Posting their work to r/mildlyinfuriating, the UCR student explained that none of their work was written by AI, even though they did admit to “bullsh*tting” their way through. After all, who hasn’t tried to fluff up their past school assignments to the max with fancy vocab and wordy sentences? Not to mention, the student claims that English is not their first language. Still, the professor didn’t listen to the student’s claims, saying that “I know what I’m doing; this is AI.” As a result, she failed their work and said “she was doing them a courtesy of not reporting it.”
But OP does confess that they are no stranger to using ChatGPT as an assistant for their work. For instance, instead of googling for synonyms or searching up words on sites like Thesaurus.com or PowerThesaurus.org, they simply ask OpenAI’s AI bot for help. But they firmly claim they did not use the chatbot to help write the paper or generate any text for it. The issue here is that, by using ChatGPT’s help with finding words to put into their work, the professor mistakenly attributed it all to AI. As one commenter puts it, “This is interesting to think about how the more people use AI, the more their own writing will sound like AI. It’s so depressing.”
Plenty of users in the post’s comment section put in their complaints of how AI has sort of ‘stolen’ their habit of using certain words or writing styles, like em dash usage. It’s ridiculous if you think about it, as plenty, if not a grand majority, of academic writing is just jargon and word salads mashed together. Now, if students attempt to copy that style with fancy words and less personality-driven writing, professors could accuse them of AI and even fail them, like this Cali student’s case. As OP says, maybe it’s “time to write like a toddler and start every sentence with ‘I think’.”
