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%.

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.