The Daily, the student newspaper at Ball State University in Indiana, ran an article recently with this headline:
Best Way to Remove AI Plagiarism from Text: Bypass AI Detectors
So, that’s pretty bad. There’s no real justification that I can imagine for advising students on how not to get caught committing academic fraud. But here we are.
The article is absent a byline, of course. And it comes with the standard disclaimer that papers and publishers probably believe absolves them of responsibility:
This post is provided by a third party who may receive compensation from the products or services they mention.
Translated, this means that some company, probably a soulless, astroturf digital content and placement agent, was paid by a cheating provider to place their dubious content and improve their SEO results. The agent, in turn, pays the newspaper for the “post” to appear on their pages, under their masthead. The paper, in turn, gets to play the ridiculous and tiring game of — “that’s not us.”
We covered similar antics before, in Issue 204.
Did not mean to rhyme. Though, I do it all the time.
Anyway, seeing cheating services in a student newspaper feels new, and doubly problematic — not only increasing the digital credibility of companies that sell deception and misconduct, but perhaps actually reaching target customers. It’s not ideal.
I did e-mail The Daily to ask about the article/advertisement and where they thought their duties sat related to integrity and fraud. They have not replied, and the article is still up.
That article is what you may expect. It starts:
Is your text AI-generated? If so, it may need to be revised to remove AI plagiarism.
You may need to remove the plagiarism — not actually do the work, by the way — because, they say, submitting “AI-plagiarized content” in assignments and research papers is, and I quote, “not advisable.”
Do tell, how do you use AI to generate text and remove the plagiarism? The Ball State paper is happy to share. Always check your paper through an AI-detector, they advise. Then, “it should be converted to human-like content.”
The article continues:
Dozens of AI humanizing tools are available to bypass AI detectors and produce 100% human-like content.
And, being super helpful, the article lists and links to several of them. But first, in what I can just barely describe as English, the article includes:
If the text is generated or paraphrased with AI models are most likely that AI plagiarised.
If you write the content using custom LLMs with advanced prompts are less liked AI-generated.
When you copied word-to-word content from other AI writers.
Trying to humanize AI content with cheap Humanizer tools leads to AI plagiarism.
Ah, what’s that again?
Following that, the piece offers step-by-step advice to remove AI content, directing readers to AI detectors, then pasting the flagged content into a different software and:
Click the “Humanize” button.
The suggested software, the article says:
produces human content for you.
First, way creepy. Second, there is zero chance that’s not academic cheating. Covering your tracks is not clever, it’s an admission of intent to deceive.
And, the article goes on:
If you successfully removed AI-generated content with [company redacted], you can use it.
Go ahead, use it. But let’s also reflect on the obvious — using AI content to replace AI content is no way removing AI content.
Surprising absolutely no one, the article also suggests using QuillBot, which is owned by cheating titan Course Hero (now Learneo), and backed by several education investors (see Issue 80).
Continuing:
Quillbot can accurately rewrite any AI-generated content into human-like content
Yes, the company that education investors have backed is being marketed as a way to sneak AI-created academic work past AI detection systems. It’s being marketed that way because that is exactly what it does. These investors, so far as I can tell, seem not the least bit bothered by the fact that one of their companies is polluting and destroying the teaching and learning value proposition they claim to support.
As long as the checks keep coming - amiright?
After listing other step-by-step ways to get around AI detectors, the article says:
If you use a good service, you can definitely transform AI-generated content into human-like content.
By that, they mean not getting caught cheating.
None of this should really surprise anyone. Where there’s a dollar to be made by peddling unethical shortcuts, someone will do it because people will pay.
Before moving on, let me point out once again the paradox — if AI detectors do not work, as some people mistakenly claim, why are companies paying for articles such as this one to sell services to bypass them? If AI detection was useless, there would be no market at all for these fingerprint erasure services.
This article first appeared at Derek Newton's The Cheat Sheet.
