https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-robots-and-its-pushing-them-to-use-more-ai/ [ ] Techdirt. [ ] * Sign In * Register * Preferences Techdirt [ ] * TechDirt * GreenHouse * Free Speech * Error 402 * Ctrl-Alt-Speech * Deals * Jobs * Support Techdirt [podcast-ti] Utah's Proposal To Tax Online Pornography Is A Civil Liberties Disaster Waiting To Happen Iceland Foods Finally Surrenders In Trademark Fight With Iceland, The Country We're Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They're Not Robots, And It's Pushing Them To Use More AI [uses-of-te] (Mis)Uses of Technology from the can-someone-ask-an-ai-about-incentives dept Fri, Mar 6th 2026 03:13pm - Mike Masnick 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. Dadland Maye, a writing instructor who has taught at many universities, has published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education documenting exactly how this has played out across his classrooms--and it's even worse than what I described. Because the AI detection regime hasn't just pushed students to write worse. It has actively pushed students who never used AI to start using it. This fall, a student told me she began using generative AI only after learning that stylistic features such as em dashes were rumored to trigger AI detectors. To protect herself from being flagged, she started running her writing through AI tools to see how it would register. A student who was writing her own work, with her own words, started using AI tools defensively--not to cheat, but to make sure her own writing wouldn't be accused of cheating. The tool designed to prevent AI use became the reason she started using AI. This is the Cobra Effect in its purest form. The British colonial government in India offered a bounty for dead cobras to reduce the cobra population. People started breeding cobras to collect the bounty. When the government scrapped the program, the breeders released their now-worthless cobras, making the problem worse than before. AI detection tools are our cobra bounty. They were supposed to reduce AI use. Instead, they're incentivizing it. And this goes well beyond one student's experience. Maye describes a pattern spreading across his classrooms: One student, a native English speaker, had long been praised for writing above grade level. This semester, a transfer to a new college brought a new concern. Professors unfamiliar with her work would have no way of knowing that her confident voice had been earned. She turned to Google Gemini with a pointed inquiry about what raises red flags for college instructors. That inquiry opened a door. She learned how prompts shape outputs, when certain sentence patterns attract scrutiny, and ways in which stylistic confidence trigger doubt. The tool became a way to supplement coursework and clarify difficult material. Still, the practice felt wrong. "I feel like I'm cheating," she told me, although the impulse that led her there had been defensive. A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability. Then there's this: After being accused of using AI in a different course, another student came to me. The accusation was unfounded, yet the paper went ungraded. What followed unsettled me. "I feel like I have to stay abreast of the technology that placed me in that situation," the student said, "so I can protect myself from it." Protection took the form of immersion. Multiple AI subscriptions. Careful study of how detection works. A fluency in tools the student had never planned to use. The experience ended with a decision. Other professors would not be informed. "I don't believe they will view me favorably." The false accusation resulted in the student subscribing to multiple AI services and studying how the detection systems work. Not because they wanted to cheat, but because they felt they had no other option for self-defense. And then they decided to keep quiet about it, because telling professors about their AI literacy would only invite more suspicion. Look, I get it: some students are absolutely using AI to cheat, and that's a real issue educators have to deal with. But the detection-first approach has created an incentive structure that's almost perfectly backwards. Students who don't use AI are punished for writing too well. Students who are falsely accused learn that the only defense is to become fluent in the very tools they're accused of using. And the students savvy enough to actually cheat? They're the ones best equipped to game the detectors. The tools aren't catching the cheaters--they're radicalizing the honest kids. As Maye explains, this dynamic is especially brutal at open-access institutions like CUNY, where students already face enormous pressures: At CUNY, many students work 20 to 40 hours a week. Many are multilingual. They encounter a different AI policy in nearly every course. When one professor bans AI entirely and another encourages its use, students learn to stay quiet rather than risk a misstep. The burden of inconsistency falls on them, and it takes a concrete form: time, revision, and self-surveillance. One student described spending hours rephrasing sentences that detectors flagged as AI-generated even though every word was original. "I revise and revise," the student said. "It takes too much time." Just like my kid and the school-provided AI checker, Maye's student spent a bunch of wasted time "revising" to avoid being flagged. Students spending hours rewriting their own original work--work that they wrote--because an algorithm decided it sounded too much like a machine. That's time taken away from studying, working, caring for family, or, you know, actually learning to write better. Learning to revise is a key part of learning to write. But revisions should be done to serve the intent of the writing. Not to appease a sketchy bot checker. What Maye articulates so well is that the damage here goes beyond false positives and wasted time. The deeper problem is what these tools teach students about writing: Detection tools communicate, even when instructors do not, that writing is a performance to be managed rather than a practice to be developed. Students learn that style can count against them, and that fluency invites suspicion. We are teaching an entire generation of students that the goal of writing is to sound sufficiently unremarkable! Not to express an original thought, develop an argument, find your voice, or communicate with clarity and power--but to produce text bland enough that a statistical model doesn't flag it. The word "devoid" is too risky. Em dashes are suspicious. Confident prose is a red flag. My kid's Harrison Bergeron experience was, in retrospect, a perfect preview of all of this. Vonnegut warned about a society that forces everyone down to the lowest common denominator by handicapping anyone who shows ability. And here we are, with AI detection tools functioning as the Handicapper General of student writing, punishing fluency, penalizing vocabulary, and training students to sound as mediocre as possible to avoid triggering an algorithm that can't even tell the difference between a thoughtful essay and a ChatGPT output. Maye eventually did the only sensible thing: he stopped playing the game. Midway through the semester, I stopped requiring students to disclose their AI use. My syllabi had asked for transparency, yet the expectation had become incoherent. The boundary between using AI and navigating the internet had blurred beyond recognition. Asking students to document every encounter with the technology would have turned writing into an accounting exercise. I shifted my approach. I told students they could use AI for research and outlining, while drafting had to remain their own. I taught them how to prompt responsibly and how to recognize when a tool began replacing their thinking. Rather than taking a "guilt-first" approach, he took one that dealt with reality and focused on what would actually be best for the learning environment: teach students to use the tools appropriately, not as a shortcut, and don't start from a position of suspicion. The atmosphere in my classroom changed. Students approached me after class to ask how to use these tools well. One wanted to know how to prompt for research without copying output. Another asked how to tell when a summary drifted too far from its source. These conversations were pedagogical in nature. They became possible only after AI use stopped functioning as a disclosure problem and began functioning as a subject of instruction. Once the surveillance regime was lifted, students could actually learn. They asked genuine questions about how to use tools effectively and ethically. They engaged with the technology as a subject worth understanding rather than a minefield to navigate. The teacher-student relationship shifted from adversarial to educational, which is, you know, kind of the whole point of school. That line Maye uses: "these conversations were pedagogical in nature" keeps sticking in my brain. The fear of AI undermining teaching made it impossible to teach. Getting past that fear brought back the pedagogy. Incredible. This piece should be required reading for every educator thinking that "catching" students using AI is the most important thing. As Maye discovered through painful experience, the answer is to stop treating AI as a policing problem and start treating it as an educational one. Teach students how to write. Teach them how to think critically about AI tools. Teach them when those tools are helpful, when they're harmful, and when they're a crutch. And for the love of all that is good, stop deploying detection tools that punish good writers and push everyone toward a bland, algorithmic mean. We are, quite literally, limiting our students' writing to satisfy a machine that can't tell the difference. Vonnegut would have had a field day. Filed Under: ai, ai detection, cheating, dadland maye, students 16 CommentsLeave a Comment If you liked this post, you may also be interested in... * Anthropic's Statement To The 'Department Of War' Reads Like A Hostage Note Written In Business Casual * OpenAI Rewrites Contract, Anthropic Returns to Negotiate--The Chaos Continues * Rubio To World: Stop Doing The Exact Same Thing The US Just Did * AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No. * Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Let Fly The Claudes Of War, With Casey Newton * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Rate this comment as insightful Rate this comment as funny You have rated this comment as insightful You have rated this comment as funny Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam You have flagged this comment The first word has already been claimed The last word has already been claimed Lightbulb icon Laughing icon Flag icon Lightbulb icon Laughing icon Comments on "We're Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They're Not Robots, And It's Pushing Them To Use More AI" Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment * Filter comments in by Time * Filter comments as Threaded * Filter only comments rated Insightful * Filter only comments rated funny LOL * Filter only comments that are Unread 16 Comments Collapse all replies [29662251f2]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 3:19 pm anyone have a link to the full text of the source? Collapse replies (1) Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word Threaded [2] [user-default]Mudkip (profile) says: March 7, 2026 at 7:58 am Re: You can find it here: https://archive.is/j2jbW Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [a647399984]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 3:33 pm An experiment somebody should try: run every piece of official communication from your school through those alleged "AI" detectors. Collapse replies (1) Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word Threaded [2] [user-default]HotHead (profile) says: March 7, 2026 at 12:49 pm Re: This is a good idea where students can run the AI detector on arbitrary writing. But in a school that uses AI detectors the way the schools I attended used plagiarism detectors, the detector runs only whenever the student submits something for an assignment. Options for the student to follow your idea include: 1. submitting school announcements, then "resubmitting" their actual response for the assignment. (students should double check that the assignment system allows resubmissions!) 2. using different AI detectors than the school might use on student assignments, because a different AI detector will still illustrate the same point 3. convincing teachers to run school announcements (or the teacher's sample responses) through the school's AI detector (e.g. by making fake assignments for the teacher's internal testing) Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [f710aa16ce]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 3:53 pm Problem is: if ai wasn't being abused by bad actors and/or companies, they're wouldn't be the need for so detection. The word "devoid" is too risky. Em dashes are suspicious. Confident prose is a red flag. Just my opinion: I'm more concerned that even bland words will be suspicious and eventually students will start writing like robots to a point that it will hurt them later in life. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [058e48a80c]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 4:00 pm I have definitely not seen any signs of it harming students with strong vocabularies, who have distinct writing styles. Where I HAVE seen it appearing to become a problem is precisely where you would expect. Systems designed to trend towards averages of their training material, produce distinctly average output, and so the students I see hitting issues from it are the most normal, average ones. The poor ones, it's obvious when they used it, because they are the ones who don't know when questioned what words in their essays mean, and cannot summarise what they were trying to communicate with it in their own words. The obviously good ones, their writing clearly stands out as not being written with assistance because they tend to be the ones with solidly referenced work who can, when asked, describe the content of the sources they used. But for anyone who turns in work that definitely qualifies for a passing grade, but perhaps is written in a less confident manner, so hews heavily towards adherence to broader style guides, has a less showy lexicon, etc. That is the kind of writing which generated stuff always reminds me of when I see it. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [bc622a9a2a]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 5:07 pm But eventually we'll get to the common good which AI will provide. Right? So close, almost there, man. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [48386824c8]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 5:58 pm "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." Sounding good has always been suspicious. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [3e75d6a946]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 6:18 pm "Cheating" shouldn't even be penalized. It's a non-issue. If the point of education is to teach students, they're only cheating themselves. Collapse replies (1) Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word Threaded [2] This comment has been deemed insightful by the community. [user-default]Mudkip (profile) says: March 7, 2026 at 8:01 am Re: I'm not sure that approach makes much sense for fields whose professionals can hurt people if they aren't truly competent (medicine and arrchitecture come to mind). Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [da16c39cfc]Troste says: March 6, 2026 at 6:33 pm "We're Training Students To Write Worse " ... who is the 'We' in that indictment ? and how widespread is the alleged problem Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [user-default]MrWilson (profile) says: March 6, 2026 at 8:06 pm You see these patterns in the cycles of technology development where you go from the wild west, free range, full of possibilities stage to consolidation and legislation and eventually full enshittification and wealth-funded corporate dominance. And there are victims along the way who pay the price for being in front of the train. This happened with computers and networking and the hacking freakouts of the FBI (i.e. Bruce Sterling's Hacker Crackdown), with copyright enforcement and impoverished teens being prosecuted for piracy (Napster, Limewire, infinite lawsuits), etc. College instructors have used demanded proctored exams that require webcams that record eye movement to detect cheating and invade privacy. Meanwhile, douche DOGE dropouts use ChatGPT for bigotry prompts to cut funding to breast cancer research. Again again, tech is a tool and tools will be used by the poor for opportunities and often as the only, insufficient, inhuman resource for a modicum of care and support while the one percent uses it to dehumanize, commodify, and dominate for profit and power. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word This comment has been deemed insightful by the community. [f435fd8498]Anonymous Coward says: March 6, 2026 at 8:13 pm This is the Cobra Effect in its purest form. It is also an example of Goodhart's Law: when a measure (an AI checker) becomes a target (output of the AI checker determines your grade), it ceases to be a good measure (students will focus on the output of the AI checker). What Maye articulates so well is that the damage here goes beyond false positives and wasted time. The deeper problem is what these tools teach students about writing This is a risk that is inherent to using any form of grading. Getting a passing grade becomes the student's primary goal, overriding the learning experience. Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [youarewrong-av]Thad (profile) says: March 6, 2026 at 9:24 pm -- Collapse replies (1) Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word Threaded [2] [u2515_100x0-1]ECA (profile) says: March 6, 2026 at 10:11 pm Re: ?? Good comment Reply View in chronology Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word [22c49706f1]Daydream says: March 6, 2026 at 10:22 pm People learn to write, by reading, and learning to emulate what they read. AIs learn to write, by reading, and learning to emulate what they read. If your detection tool flags something, that doesn't mean it was written by AI, it means that whoever wrote it learned from some of the same sources the AI did. Ironically, it sounds like in trying to flush out artificial intelligence, these tools are only succeeding in encouraging the artificial and punishing intelligence. 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