The news this week is that the Oscars have officially banned AI scriptwriters from receiving awards. Only real people need apply. This is just the latest act of frustration over AI doing human work.
Teachers, too, are banning AI writing by their students. AI has caught on so quickly with students that they are using it to do their homework. And if students suspect their teachers will recognize that AI did their work, students can resubmit the homework to AI and ask that it be rewritten to sound more like the student—a seventh grader with a C average who misspells their, there, and they’re and who doesn’t recognize run-on sentences.
According to December 2025 polling by RAND (a research organization, http://www.rand.org), 48 to 62 percent of middle, high school and college students used AI regularly for homework between May and December 2025. It’s easy. For example, a student can type into ChatGPT a question like “Who really caused the tragic deaths of Romeo and Juliet?” In less than three seconds a response begins to appear, naming several possible culprits and reasons for their choice. With slight finagling of words, the student has an answer good enough to turn in. No thought about the question is necessary, and only minor thought is required about how to circumvent a teacher’s plagiarism detectors.
Another way students are using AI is to read summaries of whatever they need to read, and then responding to teacher questions based on the summaries, not based on the original writing. Students are bypassing Shakespeare and J.D. Salinger to let AI tell them the gist of that literature.
Teachers have become as wily as students. One way teachers have found to eliminate AI is to ban the use of classroom computers or other electronic devices. Students are required to read original documents in class, leave the documents at school, and write about them only in school. Some teachers have given up on requiring at-home writing altogether; rather, they require students to write in class in longhand on numbered papers the teacher distributes. When students need to revise, they cut apart their rough drafts and tape them together in a better order. For students who haven’t learned to print or use cursive clearly, this can be tough.
If teachers ban the use of electronics in classes because of embedded AI, are they denying students practice on the technology they will use in their future jobs? Or are they preparing them to be good thinkers?
English Writing Teacher 