This is why I love hearing large businesses complain about all the fake low effort job applications they get with AI as if this wasn't the inevitable end state of fakeness and inauthentic corporate language they have been pushing for decades.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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As if that same job posting wasn't itself likely written with AI lol
HEY HEY that is different ok!
My son has gone back to college in his late 20s, after having a lot more experience in everything, including writing. He's become an excellent writer, but he has expressed that he's worried that his younger peers are such bad writers, that the profs will think he must be using AI.
I just told him to keep talking in class, and they'll figure out real quick that he really is that smart, and they won't question his writing. That already seems to be happening.
It's when the dummy shows up with a well written paper out of the blue, that their red flags go up.
This predates the ai bubble. There used to be a really common "plagiarism detector" (something like CheckMeIn?] that would generate a "similarity score" with a database of literature. Institutions were welcome to set their own thresholds of what they considered too similar. I hit the threshold multiple times in completely original works by using language that was simply too literary or formal in nature.
Mind I had been accused of plagiarism by teachers prior to those tools for much the same reason based only on vibes, so maybe that was a step up, since students could use it ahead of time.
There was a news story around that time of somebody getting taken through disciplinary action due to getting close to 100% similarity on the tool - eventually to discover that their own essays had Venn included in the database.
This predates the ai bubble. There used to be a really common “plagiarism detector” (something like CheckMeIn?] that would generate a “similarity score” with a database of literature. Institutions were welcome to set their own thresholds of what they considered too similar. I hit the threshold multiple times in completely original works by using language that was simply too literary or formal in nature.
This is because all art are forms of remixing, whether it's intentional or not. We're teaching the wrong lessons here.
For many many centuries, art and artists, whether it's musicians, artists, actors, writers, essayists, whoever, they have been facing an uphill battle of oversaturation in each creative industry. It's only gotten worse in the past 50-75 years, and we're more exposed to the sheer numbers now. We are throwing a drop of water into an ocean and hoping people will notice.
Trying to use "plagiarism detectors" against databases of millions or billions of pages is about as pointless as accusing songwriters of plagiarizing songs based on four notes. There are only so many musically-useful combinations of four notes, and they have all been used. Adam Neely has been reporting on this garbage for years.
LLMs are just making the problem even more obvious: creativity is not unique, it is not unique to people, and people have been mentally trained to expect uniqueness so much that we purposely ignore 99.999% of the material that is offered to us. As such, only 0.0001% of the ones who create earn any sort of popularity, and the rest starve to death. We ourselves are starved for content, as we consume anything that fits our extremely narrow definition of creativity like the voracious vampires we are.
18% is nowhere near high enough to be throwing around accusations like that. Seems like the teachers don't know how to interpret the results.
The teachers didn't, the parents freaked out.
I’m accused of being AI on other sites
Other sites? Happens here, too. The best answer is troll them by imitating AI.
I'm confident in my role here. I think I've gotten that accusation once, and it was quickly swatted back not by me, but rather people who'd seen my posts over the years.
AI checkers seem like a stupid and lazy way to determine if a student used AI to write their paper when the teacher could simply sit down with the student to ask them about the content of their to paper.
AI checkers for text (but the same is true for the ones pretending to spot AI pictures and videos) also don't work by definition.
The AI tries to make it's "product' perfect. It does not have the ability to spot its own mistakes and telltale signs, or it wouldn't make them in the first place.
So every AI check is actually cheating. In pictures and videos with hidden watermarks, in text with typical clues like the mentioned '–' or vocabulary more prevalent in AI texts that the average human work.
– and use emdashes.
That's more a matter of 95% of people not even knowing how to type a '–' with their standard keyboard layout.
I don't get that, I've always used them, long before AI was a thing.
Word processors (like MS Word) have been doing it automatically since I was in school. Same with double spacing after a period.
Which is great for one application, but two spaces after each period would be hell to edit down to AP Style.
I mean, Ctrl+H and switching two spaces to one is easily doable, but that's not where I want to start the editing process.
In my experience that is in fact more of a MS Word feature (and very inconsistent at it) than a general word processor feature. But maybe I'm underestimating the impact on "average texts" simply because my use of MS products is far below average.
I doubt the average student is using anything other than Word, unless they are using AI to begin with.
I've found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it's a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.
I realized recently that I enjoy reading peoples janky personal messages online. You know it's a real person. Or at least it probably is.
I hope I've been sufficiently janky for you with my posts.
Absolutely lol
I think that's a very intentional feature, brought by the techbros who urge kids to skip uni.
I can't get Idiocracy out of my mind when I read this...