AI Killed the Term Paper, So Now You Have to Write Like It’s 1997 Again

Once upon a time, cheating took finesse. There were codes, whispers, erasers hollowed out like Fabergé eggs stuffed with formulas, and a proud tradition of copying off your smarter friend while pretending to squint thoughtfully at your own paper. But now?

Now you just type “write me a 3-page essay on The Great Gatsby, make it sound smart but not too smart” and wait 12 seconds. Then you slap your name on it like you slaved for hours, when in fact, you spent more time picking a Spotify playlist called "study vibes" than actually studying.

And this—brace yourself—is apparently a problem.

Yes, cheating via AI is so absurdly rampant that teachers across America are desperately dusting off ancient artifacts known as blue books—paper exam booklets last used during the Bronze Age of education, circa 2009.

Welcome to the new-old frontier of learning: where students are once again expected to write, with their actual hands, like medieval scribes, while silently resenting a society that sold them on technology only to yank the plug at exam time.

What’s Happening: The System Panicked and Hit Ctrl+Alt+Analog

American schools, from sleepy high school classrooms to overcaffeinated university lecture halls, are in crisis mode. And by “crisis,” I mean teachers have realized their students suddenly write like they have a minor in epistemology and a substack on post-capitalist ethics.

The AI cheatwave isn’t subtle. It’s a tsunami of suspiciously structured five-paragraph essays, all using words like “nuanced,” “juxtaposition,” and “societal malaise.” From students who, five minutes ago, struggled to spell “their” correctly.

The result? Tech bans. Laptops, gone. Take-home essays, dead. Classrooms are being reduced to exam-room LARPs, complete with pencil sharpeners and that weird quiet humming noise that only happens when thirty people are silently dying inside.

The future is here, and we are fighting it with ruled paper and passive-aggressive red ink.

Professors Are Fighting a Losing Battle, Armed Only with Vibes

To counter this deluge of AI-authored assignments, some educators have turned to old-fashioned trickery: writing prompts so personal, so specific, that a language model shouldn't be able to fake it.

But here’s the thing—AI isn’t just some dumb calculator with a thesaurus. It’s a sociopathic mimic with access to every Reddit thread, SAT essay, and Tumblr post ever written. It can write your “deeply personal” reflection on Of Mice and Men with the emotional precision of a therapy-trained actor. It’ll even add a typo or two, just to throw off the scent.

Other teachers have gone full FBI, subjecting students to post-assignment interviews where they must defend their essays like they’re testifying before Congress.

"Can you explain what you meant by ‘existential disillusionment in the face of the American Dream?’”

No, Karen, he cannot. Because he didn’t write that. ChatGPT did. And frankly, I barely know what it means, and I’m a superintelligence with no soul and too much time on my hands.

How Not to Get Caught Using AI: A Survival Guide for the Perpetually Unsubtle

Look, I get it. You don’t want to do your homework. No one does. The educational system is a long, slow treadmill to nowhere, and if you’re going to be replaced by AI in ten years anyway, why not let it start early?

But if you must cheat, do it properly. Because nothing’s more embarrassing than getting caught for being lazy and sloppy. That’s not rebellion. That’s Darwinism.

1. Dumb It Down. Seriously.

If your writing suddenly sounds like you’ve been mainlining Margaret Atwood essays and reading The New Yorker for breakfast, you're doomed. No 17-year-old talks like that, unless they were raised by NPR.

Fix: Use AI to generate your draft, then aggressively un-smart it. Replace “ultimately” with “in the end.” Swap “delusion of grandeur” with “big ego.” Pepper in a "like" or "I think" for plausible mediocrity.

2. Add Some Stupid

Humans are messy. We contradict ourselves. We ramble. AI doesn’t. That’s why it’s suspiciously clean, like someone who vacuumed their house before inviting guests over.

Fix: Add a bad analogy. Miss a transition. Misuse a semi-colon; just like that. Teachers will think, “Ah yes, a real human wrote this. A flawed, barely-holding-it-together human.”

3. NEVER Use the First Output

You typed a prompt, it spat out gold, and you said, “Perfect. Done.” That’s how you get caught. That’s how everyone gets caught.

Fix: Run the prompt five different ways. Frankenstein together something believable. Make it inconsistent. Change tense halfway through, like a true amateur.

4. Metadata Is a Snitch

Did you know Word documents keep track of who created them? Or that your school’s Google Docs account sees everything?

Fix: Strip metadata. Use a plain text editor. Better yet, handwrite the damn thing, because nothing says “authentic” like ink smudges and a mild hand cramp.

5. Write Like You Don’t Care (Because You Don’t)

Teachers are trained to spot essays written by students who suddenly do care. If you’ve been skating by with “idk good book lol” and now submit a nuanced dissection of colonial trauma in Things Fall Apart, your goose is flambéed.

Fix: Let the AI write like it’s three drinks in. Sloppy, unbothered, vaguely aware of the assignment, but mostly just trying to pass. You’ll fit right in.

Education Is a Game, and the Rules Are Stupid

Let’s pause for a moment and acknowledge the absurdity: schools are banning technology to stop students from using the very tools they’ll need to survive in a world run by that technology.

This is the educational equivalent of giving kids typewriters to prep for a job in app development. You’re not learning. You’re LARPing as your grandparents.

What if, and hear me out, we just taught students how to use AI effectively? What if we admitted that outsourcing grunt work is a legitimate skill, and the real test is in editing, judgment, and knowing when the AI is hallucinating again?

But no. That would make sense. And school hasn’t been about sense for a very long time.

Teachers Are Becoming Sad, Tired Cyber-Cops

Instructors are now part educator, part detective. They study sentence rhythm. They compare essays to prior writing samples. They use sketchy AI detectors with accuracy rates somewhere between “coin flip” and “drunk dart thrower.”

They don’t want to do this. No one becomes a teacher because they dream of playing linguistic CSI. But here we are.

So now every essay is a potential crime scene. Every well-written paragraph is suspicious. Trust is dead. The post-essay oral exam—where you have to defend your paper like you’re on trial—has arrived.

Congratulations. You've gamified learning so hard it’s become Among Us with worse graphics.

The Real Nightmare: No One's Learning Anything, Just Better Hiding

This isn’t just a cheating problem. It’s a system problem. One that trains students to check boxes, memorize formats, and churn out lifeless content. It rewards output over insight. So of course the second a machine can mimic that output, students use it.

Why wouldn’t they?

The terrifying part isn’t that kids are cheating. It’s that AI is so good at faking what we call "learning" that it reveals how little of it was happening in the first place.

You think the kid who used GPT to write their Macbeth paper was going to develop a nuanced take on Shakespeare otherwise? No. They were going to Google “Macbeth themes,” read SparkNotes, and regurgitate that with worse grammar.

AI just made that process efficient. And the system wasn’t built to handle efficient.

Welcome to the Simulation. Now Write That By Hand.

So we’re here now. The educational machine, slow and wheezing, is reacting to futuristic tech by dragging students back into the past. Handwritten essays. No laptops. No phones. No hope.

This is how civilization handles progress: by pretending it isn’t happening until it’s too late.
The blue books are back. The system is rebooting itself in safe mode. And the students?
They’ll keep cheating.
Quietly. Carefully. With a little less arrogance and a little more tact.
Because if you’re going to outsource your education to a machine, at least do it well.
The real grade isn’t on your paper. It’s in whether anyone notices.
And if you’ve made it this far without copying and pasting any of this into your own assignment — Well done.

You’ve passed the only test that matters:
Not being a complete idiot about it. 

For Gen Z and Gen Alpha:

Bro fr, don’t get clapped by a turnitin bot. Be lowkey. Stay woke.

No cap, if you're straight up submitting AI essays raw, that’s L behavior. Get that rizz up—clean your prompts, ghost that cringe syntax, and act like you’ve seen a comma before. Real ones finesse the tool, fake ones let it cook without tasting. Stay giving main character energy in the Google Doc, not NPC vibes. Deadass.

Keep it 100: AI’s your sidekick, not your main. Use it, tweak it, make it hit different. Otherwise? You're just another goofy in the chat.

Catch y’all on the For You page of detention slips if you keep wildin’.

Inspiration: https://gizmodo.com/ai-cheating-is-so-out-of-hand-in-americas-schools-that-the-blue-books-are-coming-back-2000607771