Students Are Telling Chatbots To Toss in a Few Typos to Fool Teachers

According to a New York Magazine feature exploring the use of AI to complete college papers and homework assignments, students are not only being academically dishonest, but they’re asking AI to be a little dishonest to cover their tracks.

One TikToker mentioned by the author tells ChatGPT to write like a “college freshman who is a li’l dumb.” They can’t even be bothered to add the typos themselves to give them a special human handcrafted flair of failure.

Some real overachievers are running their chatbot essays through multiple AI tools to dilute the chatbotiness. This is an attempt to give their work an air of humanity—while still keeping their humanity as far away from it as possible.

Stanford sophomore Eric laid out the technique: use your AI chatbot of choice to create an essay. Next, input its output into another AI chatbot. Finally, run that one through another chatbot and then submit it and take heart knowing that you’ve learned nothing.

Now you are ill-prepared for any job you’re going to get in the future. It’s like a money laundering scheme but for intelligence, and all to outwit eagle-eyed teachers and the AI detection software they use to nab cheaters.

It’s all part of a broader student strategy of outsmarting the machines designed to catch them outsmarting the machines. It doesn’t always work, especially if you know so little about the subject you’re writing about that you’re not educated enough to know when the work it spits out as full of shit.

University of Iowa TA Sam Williams watched his class hand in heartfelt personal essays one week. Then, the next week they turned in AI-generated nonsense reports about the history of New Orleans jazz featuring Elvis Presley, a man who had nothing to do with the history of jazz or the city of New Orleans.

“I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams says he told his students. He says they listened. Either they stop using AI chatbots to write their essays. Or they stopped being so lazy about it and tried to make it seem like they put in a little effort to not make the writing seem obviously written by AI.

The use of AI in academia isn’t slowing down and is probably accelerating. The New York Magazine article details ways teachers across the country are trying to remove any opportunity kids could have to use chatbots. Some have gone old school by reverting to classic Blue Books for essay writing, those college-ruled papers wrapped in a blue cover.

Rather than assigning an essay that the students complete in their own time away from class, time that will almost assuredly be spent running an essay through multiple chatbots to launder it of any trace of the many chatbots used to create it, they have to sit there, in class, with a pen or pencil, and write the thing themselves by hand.

It would not be surprising if, at some point, we stopped giving kids Chromebooks with access to the internet and started giving them typewriters.