In a TikTok video, an emotional student claimed she didn’t know what to do after her professor insisted she had cheated and used AI for her paper, even after promising she hadn’t touched the program at all. Sadly, these instances are becoming a regular occurrence thanks to the overreliance on programs like ChatGPT.
With AI’s growing popularity and people basically using it for every little thing, it’s not surprising that colleges have begun cracking down on students who may be using it to write their papers and complete other assignments.
At the end of the day, if you aren’t doing your own work, it’s cheating. But what happens when the tech continues to evolve, and it’s not easy to distinguish what’s natural writing and what’s AI? That’s what seems to have happened to this college student. She said she was caught in the crossfire of other students using AI.
“Bro, I spent hours working on this assignment. Hours. And the teacher’s trying to say that it’s AI,” she began in her video, clearly emotional over the allegation. “I’m sorry that I just talk normal, like what do you want from me?”
She explained that she now has a zero in the class because of this mishap, and worse, her professor thinks she’s been using AI for every single assignment. While AI use in college has become a problem, she insisted that she did not use it on this assignment or any of her past ones.
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According to more than 200 million writing assignments reviewed by Turnitin’s AI detection tool, some AI use was detected in about 1 out of 10 assignments, while only 3 out of every 100 assignments were generated mostly by AI. However, the number of students using AI to complete their schoolwork hadn’t increased during the 2023-2024 school year, according to a Stanford University survey.
Researchers polled students in 40 different high schools and found that the percentage of students who admitted to cheating has remained flat since the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI generative tools.
Those numbers from just a year ago seem to be changing, however. According to a 2025 study conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute, 92% of students are using AI to help with their schoolwork. The year prior, according to the same research, it was only 66%.
If it seems like the data is all over the place, that’s because it kind of is. AI is new and still growing in popularity by the day. It’s also changing rapidly. Add to that a percentage of students reluctant to actually admit to using the tools, and it’s hard to get an actual reading on who and how many people are using it and for what exactly.
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“A little bit of backstory. My paper came back 23% AI according to the professor, and I write all of my papers in Microsoft Word,” she said in a follow-up TikTok video. “I’ve never had an AI issue, so I’ve never had to actually track my writing. I don’t save anything to OneDrive, so when I sent it to my teacher through OneDrive, it showed no history for him.”
She explained that not only did it not save to OneDrive, but Microsoft Word also didn’t track the time she was writing. Instead, it said that she had created the document in less than one second.
However, after emailing back and forth with her professor and advocating for herself, he decided to re-read the paper and noticed that it didn’t sound like AI at all. Thankfully, he agreed to accept it and give her another grade, which turned out to be 100.
While AI detection tools are needed for students who might be using them, they definitely pose a problem for those who aren’t using them but may even write like them. For example, the use of the em-dash and the Oxford comma, which are usually signs that something was written with AI.
We are entering uncharted waters when it comes to artificial intelligence. At some point, we will need to find a balance between using it as the tool it was intended to be and overreliance on it. Too much of a good thing can quickly turn bad, especially when research shows that AI overuse can lead to declines in cognitive function and critical thinking.
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Nia Tipton is a staff writer with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and journalism who covers news and lifestyle topics that focus on psychology, relationships, and the human experience.
