{"id":29400,"date":"2025-07-28T19:36:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T19:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/29400\/"},"modified":"2025-07-28T19:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-28T19:36:07","slug":"the-biggest-signs-that-ai-wrote-a-paper-according-to-a-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/29400\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biggest Signs That AI Wrote a Paper, According to a Professor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College<\/a> for years, but his job became significantly more difficult in 2023. Not long after AI apps like ChatGPT became freely available, higher education throughout the U.S. was hit with a tsunami of automated cheating. Students have been using AI to write essays\u2014and the trend appears to be worsening as time passes. Massaro said that, out of 25 students in his classes, it isn\u2019t unusual for as many as five to turn in papers that appear to be written by AI.<\/p>\n

When ChatGPT first launched, and it became apparent that students were using it to cheat, Massaro says he used to run papers through multiple AI scanners a day. If a majority of them labeled the prose as generated by AI, he believed them. Now, however, the school doesn\u2019t allow them to upload students\u2019 work to such applications because it could be considered a breach of their privacy. It also doesn\u2019t help that the accuracy of AI detectors is unreliable<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Instead, Massaro says he must depend on his own wits to assess whether a paper was illegitimately conjured or not. To do this, he\u2019s put together a checklist of tell-tale signs that a paper is AI. Whenever a paper is handed in, he consults that list. He shared some of those red flags with Gizmodo, creating a clearer picture of the hellish conditions that AI has imposed on America\u2019s educators.<\/p>\n

Too Many Em-Dashes <\/p>\n

One hint that a paper may be generated is a plethora of em dashes. For whatever reason, apps like ChatGPT like to include plenty of these little. Now, Massaro has a test that he does. If he suspects a student of having generated their essay with AI, he will call them up to his desk and ask them to produce an em-dash on the computer. Frequently, the student doesn\u2019t even know how to do it, he said. \u201cI\u2019ll be like, your paper is full of em-dashes, just show me how you did it,\u201d he said. If the student struggles, it\u2019s obvious what has happened.<\/p>\n

No Indents <\/p>\n

Massaro says, contrary to the style stipulations of the traditional college essay, it\u2019s common for text that was copied and pasted from a chatbot to have no paragraph indentations. The output from ChatGPT and its ilk notably doesn\u2019t have any need for indents. If a student\u2019s paper is defined by big blocky chunks of text, there\u2019s a good chance that a robot wrote it.<\/p>\n

Perfect Grammar and Shallow Content <\/p>\n

If a student hands in a perfectly worded paper that doesn\u2019t have much to say, this could be another tell-tale sign of algorithmic generation, Massaro said. While there are plenty of students who may be good writers but may not have a lot of original thoughts, auto-generated writing has several tells that become obvious over time. Massaro describes the AI style as featuring \u201cuniform sentence and paragraph length,\u201d in which every \u201cparagraph is about the same size, with a rhythmic, mechanical feel.\u201d The writing may also have a \u201chyper-formal tone,\u201d he said, which is often characterized by an \u201coverly polished academic voice not typical of student work.\u201d<\/p>\n

No Drafting History <\/p>\n

Another red flag is a total absence of any participation in the in-class drafting process, Massaro said. As part of his composition classes, Massaro hosts peer reviews and conferences. A student may also claim that they met with the school\u2019s Writing Center to put the essay together, but, in reality, did not do this either. When students turn in these essays, they may also include \u201cunusual vocabulary for the student\u201d that is characterized by \u201csudden jumps in sophistication not seen in previous work or class discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Impersonal Writing <\/p>\n

Massaro said he occasionally hands out personal reflection papers. A student who actually writes the paper based on, say, their experiences working at the local 7-Eleven, will include all sorts of weird personal details that an AI would never think to invent, Massaro said. On the other hand, if the paper is auto-generated, it may wax on in a very abstract way about the importance of \u201cfriendship\u201d to humanity, he chuckled.<\/p>\n

Leftover Prompt Inputs <\/p>\n

Shockingly, some students have been so sloppy with their cheating that they\u2019ve actually left prompt inputs from their interactions with a chatbot in the final essay that they turned in, Massaro says.<\/p>\n

Citations Bullshit <\/p>\n

It\u2019s well known that AI has a habit of \u201challucinating\u201d information. In a student\u2019s paper, these AI-spawned references will manifest themselves in many different forms, including plainly incorrect or invented information and fake citations. This can create hours of additional work for Massaro, as he\u2019s forced to hunt down whether an obscure fact in an essay is real or not. This sometimes includes poring over real academic journals and books that were cited in the student\u2019s papers, but that may not feature the citations included in the student\u2019s bibliography (because they\u2019re fake).<\/p>\n

Confronting a student about cheating can be awkward and difficult, Massaro said, although it is usually easy to tell what has happened right off the bat, he added. Frequently, a guilty student will admit that they used AI, or will simply not respond to Massaro\u2019s email (many of his students are remote). Innocent students often protest, and Massaro said he tends to believe them.<\/p>\n

The biggest disappointment about the rise of AI-writing is that it is robbing students of their ability to cultivate their own intellectual and creative identity, he said. \u201cThis is the time when they\u2019re supposed to be finding their voice,\u201d he said. Instead, AI is doing the talking (and the thinking) for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Massaro has taught English Composition at Florida Southwestern State College for years, but his job became significantly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,1921,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-29400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}