Professor Gives Student a Zero on Their Essay, Claims There's a 27% Chance Their Summary Paragraph Was Written With AI

Emmy Pratt • Senior Editor

Oct 6, 2023 11:00 AM EDT

I do not envy college students in a post-ChatGPT world. I was lucky to graduate from undergrad a few months before that went worldwide. I'm grateful I never had to sit through a professor begging the class not to use Artificial Intelligence to write an English paper.

Even though I empathize with professors and teachers for dealing with another dog in the academic dishonesty race, I'm a bit wary of the tools they use to detect AI. Usually, when ChatGPT has written something, you can tell because it's horribly written and full of inaccuracies. Even though websites like Turn It In can help identify when work has been plagiarized, they're not as sophisticated at identifying AI writing. You can put any document into an AI detection bot, and it will probably say it's being written with some AI, whether that's true or not. One student is dealing with this firsthand after a summary they wrote is getting accused of being AI.