I’m a high school English teacher. I have two major annoyances when it comes to kids doing work.

First, a lot of kids don’t read or listen to directions. Assignment instructions are written on their papers, and I read them out loud, but I still have students asking me “What are we doing?”

That’s no big deal, though - it’s a pretty normal thing to deal with as a teacher. The real issue bugging me is students cheating on writing assignments using ChatGPT. I’m pretty good at spotting AI-generated essays. But the problem is that when I try to accuse students of using AI, they deny it. They act outraged that I would accuse them even though we both know they’re playing dumb.

I usually just give them a zero and move on with my life, but there’s always the fear that one of them might take the issue to administration. If they did, I’m not confident that admin would back me up. It’s hard to prove something is AI-generated, and these days, the higher ups are more likely to side with the student.

So I hatched a plan. I gave an open-ended creative writing assignment. The directions said to “write a story about anything you want” and then answer some questions about the story you wrote.

The thing is, when you ask ChatGPT, “Tell me a story,” it always spits out the exact same story - about a girl named Elara who lives in the woods.

”Once upon a time, in a small village nestled between rolling hills and dense forests, there lived a young woman named Elara. She was known throughout the village for her curiosity and sense of adventure, always eager to explore the world beyond the familiar paths of her home.”

So, in slightly smaller print under the instructions, I wrote ”If your main character’s name is Elara, -99 points.”

Lo and behold, I got one or two kids turn in a story about a girl named Elara who lives in woods. When I turned back the papers with a grade of 1/100 (because I find that it stings more than a zero), the kids predictably asked why. And all I had to do was point to the instructions that they didn’t read. There was no need to mention AI. We both knew what they did.

Edit: for people saying they tried ChatGPT and got a different story/name, I don’t know why it’s inconsistent. All I know is that I get the same story every time, and so do my students. The paragraph I put in the post was copied from ChatGPT directly. I discovered all this when a student submitted that same story earlier in the year for a different creative writing assignment.