The New Rule of Writing in the AI Age: Don’t Be Too Good

Today, one of my final papers came back. I got a grade that I am really happy about. The only issue my professor had was that I did not italicize the title of the newspaper that I was writing about throughout my paper. Yet I knew before handing it in that newspaper titles are supposed to be italicized. Leaving the title improperly formatted was an intentional signal to him that I, not ChatGPT, wrote it. I think AI and its use in academic writing has produced an incentive for students to write a little imperfectly. There is a lingering anxiety that if I submit a piece of work that is too well-written or formatted perfectly, the professor will just assume that AI has written it. Therefore, the goal has shifted from writing well to writing in a way that signals a human wrote it. This does not solely apply to college essays, but is also prevalent in every aspect of writing nowadays. Even in my blog, I sometimes degrade my writing to a level for the sole purpose of signaling authenticity.…