I Used Every AI Cheating App and Detector and Came to One Conclusion

Education is at a crossroads. People are having fewer kids, which means schools are bracing for lower enrollments. You can’t throw a rock on TikTok without running into an exhausted teacher ready to tear their hair out. And on top of this is the now-pervasive, often institutionally sanctioned use, and practically unprovable abuse, of AI both in and out of the classroom.  Detectors, homework helpers, essay writers, AI math wizards and even sneaky backdoor test assistants have entered the student-focused chats on cheating in a big way. Here’s a roundup of all the biggest tools and how they’re being used to get around old-school schooling. Have AI write, and then rewrite it again The big names like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook) still appear to be the gold standard for getting away with skipping out on writing in school. I spent an afternoon slinging assignments in PDF format into all these tools and each generated polished, accurate responses in the form of persuasive and well-researched essays.  Most students and educators already know about these use cases, but what is surprising is the closed loop created by AI and plagiarism-detection tools.  Turnitin, for example, the plagiarism and AI detection tool widely used across university and grade school institutions to judge human work from robot-slop, now has features designed specifically to take AI-created text and turn it into material that passes its own checkpoints. Turnitin/Screenshot by CNET I prompted Gemini to generate the opening paragraph of a discussion post assignment and plopped it into Turnitin’s AI Text Detector. In seconds, it gave me suggested phrase changes meant to read “in a more natural, human voice,” and even provided reasoning for why these new, completely AI-generated phrases would now pass the test of an AI detection tool (like Turnitin) with flying colors.  In essence, the cops are helping the culprits get away with the heist. These companies are having their cake, eating it, throwing it up and selling it again as a muffin-of-the-month subscription.  I tried a number of AI text humanizers and tested them against AI detector tools, and after being “humanized,” every single blurb passed with flying colors.  There’s a lot of talk in and out of academic circles about whether AI-detection tools are accurate or useful. From my research for this piece, I can confidently say they are worthless. Unless you’re a student who used AI to write your work and want to prove you didn’t use AI to write your work.  Do your homework, but don’t The idea that students are at least absorbing some part of the materials in assignments or school work when they use AI, because they have to copy and paste things and put together a cohesively structured output that illustrates learning outcomes they can review, has reached One Wish Willow levels of delusion. I threw a PDF of an assignment that’s supposed to be AI-proof into Claude — one of those “make something out of your work” assignments that educators like to point to as a better outcome, even if AI is involved.  The only instruction I gave the tool was: “Do this assignment. Complete all the required elements, including the visual elements, and put them into a standardized, cohesive format for submission. pdf please.” The tool produced a couple of slick infographics that looked good enough to be made by someone using a Canva template and not slick enough to raise any alarm bells on the part of an educator. Created by Rachel Kane using Claude This is just the right level of mediocre that passes classes, and at no time did I ever read the assignment or review the generated work. These types of deliverables from assignments were actually the most difficult to pin down as AI within the confines of my research. I used several AI image detectors, and the results were mixed. In one case, a tool called Winstonai flagged my AI created infograph