<
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/>
"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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
