sweasel.com

Are those last Preferred Species?
If so, she had better give them top marks if she wants tor emain employed and not in jail!!!

That account highlights a real issue, but it’s less about “AI writing style” and more about how students are using the tool.

If a student copies output verbatim, the problem isn’t just academic integrity—it’s that they’ve skipped the thinking step. When they try to retrofit understanding afterward, the result is exactly what your colleague described: uneven voice, shallow grasp, and structural confusion.

Her approach—requiring students to restate ideas in their own words—is actually sound. It shifts the focus from production to comprehension. AI can generate text, but it cannot demonstrate understanding on behalf of a student.

The harder question is the one she’s facing: what to do when a student denies obvious AI use. That’s no longer just about writing quality; it becomes a question of honesty. In practice, though, proving intent is difficult and often unproductive.

A more durable approach may be to design assignments where understanding is visible and difficult to outsource: in-class writing, iterative drafts, oral defenses, or requiring students to explain and adapt their arguments under questioning. These make it less about catching misuse and more about making genuine engagement unavoidable.

AI isn’t going away. The task isn’t to detect it perfectly—it’s to structure learning so that using it superficially doesn’t work.

There should be a way for a teacher to say in effect, “I do not believe this is the student’s own work,” and not issue a grade. The result should be the same as if the student hadn’t handed in anything at all.

In writing my PhD thesis many, many years ago, for several parts of the introductory sections (not for the rest which was my actual original research) I lifted chunks from published works and reworded them so that I couldn’t be accused of plagiarism.

AI is finding real uses. I know one top level open-source wizard who doesn’t code anymore. He designs and specifies, and delegates the coding to AI, and it works.

One of the Volokh Conspirators used AI to do a difficult piece of legal history research and write up the result. He wonders whether he can publish the write-up and who is the author.

As to your teacher friend: there are tools for detecting AI. Pick one, use it, and anything that fails is rejected. That should be institution policy. Same as with plagiarism. If that isn’t policy, the institution is or will become corrupt and useless.

Pick out the most egregious passage, copy and paste it back into AI or a regular search engine (like Google) and see what it returns. Even if the passage is larded with the student’s own words, AI should locate a source (more than one probably) for the plagiarism.

The difference between wanting to learn and wanting to pass is gonna get even more stark.