College Students Are Sprinkling Typos Into Their AI Papers on Purpose

To bypass artificial intelligence writing detection, college students are reportedly adding typos into their chatbot-generated papers.

In a wide-ranging exploration into the ways AI has rapidly changed academia, students told New York Magazine that AI cheating has become so normalized, they're figuring out creative ways to get away with it.

While it's common for students — and for anyone else who uses ChatGPT and other chatbots — to edit the output of an AI chatbot, some are adding typos manually to make essays sound more human.

Some more ingenious users are advising chatbots to essentially dumb down their writing. In a TikTok viewed by NYMag, for instance, a student said she likes to prompt chatbots to "write [an essay] as a college freshman who is a li’l dumb" to bypass AI detection.

Stanford sophomore Eric told NYMag that his classmates have gotten "really good at manipulating the systems."

"You put a prompt in ChatGPT, then put the output into another AI system, then put it into another AI system," he said. "At that point, if you put it into an AI-detection system, it decreases the percentage of AI used every time."

The irony, of course, is that students who go to such lengths to make their AI-generated papers sound human could be using that creativity to actually write the dang things.

Still, instructors are concerned by the energy students are expending on cheating with chatbots.

"They're using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays," University of Iowa teaching assistant Sam Williams told the magazine. "And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school."

When assisting a general education class on music and social change last fall, Williams said he was shocked by the change in tone and quality between students' first assignments — a personal essay about their own tastes — and their second, which dug into the history of New Orleans jazz.

Not only did those essays sound different, but many included egregious factual errors like the inclusion of Elvis Presley, who was neither a part of the Nola scene nor a jazz musician.

"I literally told my class, 'Hey, don’t use AI,'" the teaching assistant recalled. "'But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out.'"

Students have seemingly taken that advice to heart — and Williams, like his colleagues around the country, is concerned about students taking their AI use ever further.

"Whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them," the Iowa instructor said.

It's a scary precedent indeed — and one that is, seemingly, continuing unabated.

More on AI cheating: Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup

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