Every generation of students gets told that they don’t have to put in the work like they used to. For example, my teachers would roll their eyes at anybody using the font of all wisdom that is Wikipedia when I was in school.

However, copy pasting from the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia pales in comparison to the technology we have now. As we know, this is thanks to the boom in freely available artificial intelligence. In theory, it has never been easier to fake an education by running prompts through the likes of ChatGPT, but this doesn’t come without some bumps in the road. 

Arguably, AI writing skills still aren’t quite at a level that makes them truly believable as human — and it can be pretty easy to leave behind clues of their help, too. Twitter was amused recently when an example of an essay on Shakespeare play Twelfth Night got called out in the first paragraph after the student left in part of their conversation with the AI. There’s lazy, and then there’s this.