Did I use AI to write this?

Well, yes and no.

I have always enjoyed writing–including the hundreds upon hundreds of pages I had to slap together to earn degrees in literature, communications, and teaching (the professional degree in teaching, as it turns out, required the most). 

Have I always been good at writing? Certainly not according to many of my teachers, who complained of flagrant disorganization and too-liberal use of my favorite shortcut. 

Well, I could write well enough to get into college (Whew!), and a basic course in English Composition taught me even more about how to convey coherence, insight, and creativity to my writing products. 

In that class, my introduction to the Bedford Handbook actually taught me grammatical concepts for what felt like the first time (It was actually the fourth–I’d gotten considerable training in French, Spanish, and German by then). Check it out; its section on the different citation formats easily outmatches anything EasyBib can teach you.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THE BEDFORD HANDBOOK. The rest was history! My fate of becoming an English teacher was basically sealed. Still to this day as a teacher, I regularly use the Bedford Handbook to teach mechanics to my students. We call it the Punctuation Bible.

Well, before I got here, my Comparative Literature advisor/professor arranged a meeting with me whilst I was enrolled in her intro course. There, she lobbed an accusation at me that cast doubt upon so much of my identity as a scholar and some of my biggest values: ingenuity and intelligence.

She accused me of plagiarism.

This was many years ago, but despite not remembering what the paper was even about, I can remember some of her “smoking guns.” She thought some of the writing was so insightful that it had to have been written by a graduate student (OK, that was flattering). I had used the word “teleology,” which was easily explained by a course I was taking on postmodern history. The last imputation I remember was my use of the word “suspire,” which apparently prompted my widely venerated literature professor to look the word up in a dictionary, which didn’t have it. So she found one that was published in 1915 to determine the word’s meaning. It’s really just a winsome word for “breathe,” and I can thank Shift+F7 for that one. 

I remember being flushed and defensive, but I think she mostly believed me. In the end, what I assume were disjointed tone and inconsistent reasoning kept my essay at a “B,” which, OK sure, you thought a sophomore’s essay could have been written by a graduate student, so fine, a “B.”  

This whole story alludes to something about the treacherous trail to becoming a skilled writer, perhaps, or that maybe that some of life’s most crucial moments are backhanded compliments.

But it makes me think of how different it would be today, when turnitin, which uses models to detect plagiarism, has since become widely licensed by educational institutions as a sentinel against intellectual theft. In my current position as a tutor, I can use Quillbot and other similar AI-detection products to make a determination about essays’ intellectual provenance–even before reading them. 

It happened recently that one of my very sharp students, a competent writer, wrote a college essay explaining their published science research. It set off the AI detection bells. I think the detector claimed that the writing was 80 percent forged. 

Well, that makes sense, given that my student’s work was published and may have even been fodder for training the large language model! 

I still didn’t want an exclusive university to have an excuse to let this student fall through its cracks, so we massaged the wording as humanly as humanly possible.

So the landscape now, as I see it, is that students–whether simply conscientious or impeccably honest–have an incentive to use AI detectors to essentially guide their revisions. 

The ones who had Claude or GPT write their essay for them will invariably have to rewrite passages (which actually means that they’re pushing their understanding on the topic). And the ones who are honest have less to worry about. Though they might be signaling their weaknesses in insight, cohesiveness, line of reasoning, or conventions, by now, teachers would always prefer to see these than essays GPT has fairly obviously generated. 

So, how much AI did I use to write this post? If I’m honest, it took a couple of tries, but it gave me a title. I also used it to alter some vocabulary in a few places; Shift+F7 doesn’t work in the processor I used, and thesaurus.com was unwieldy. Other times, I might use GenAI to help clarify ideas, proofread, and especially outline.  Goodness knows my writing is still a little all over the place. But as someone who hopes to be sharing many more musings soon, I’m glad to have AI help me, whether it’s with finding le mot juste, or just jumpstarting task paralysis.

Go ahead! Try a detector on this post! At least you won’t need to have an uncomfortable conversation with me accusing me of plagiarism (I hope).