From Futurism · Frank Landymore · · 1m 20s
The cheaters are working harder than the students
Students are spending hours making AI work look worse, just to slip past their professors' detectors.
In brief
Students are spending hours making AI work look worse, just to slip past their professors' detectors. Detection tools don't stop AI cheating, they just teach students exactly what to hide. Originally reported by Futurism.
Lazy cheating takes effort now
Students using AI to do their coursework are putting real hours into hiding it, because professors have caught on and changed their assignments.
A bot that fakes struggling
NYU student Jared built a bot with an AI coding tool to finish his calculus homework on WebAssign, deliberately slowed down so the timestamps look human.
“The bot moves slowly, leaving a professor checking time stamps none the wiser”
He gave it away
Jared handed the tool to friends and has lost track of how many classmates are now running his automatic homework machine.
Detectors are a cheat sheet
Carleton grad Will noticed that when faculty made a fuss about em dashes and other AI tells, they handed students a checklist of what to scrub.
“People are going to find a way to cover up those little stylistic quirks”
Rewriting by hand
Will's professors banned AI writing and bragged about their detection tools, so he had Claude draft long passages and then rewrote every paragraph himself.
Four hours making it worse
UMass sophomore Theo built an astronomy deck with OpenAI's Codex, then spent four hours degrading the slides so they'd pass as sophomore work. A UCLA scholar calls this cat and mouse unwinnable.
“AI cheating isn't a technical problem that has a technical fix.”
What it means
Detection tools don't stop AI cheating, they just teach students exactly what to hide.
