If you wanted to write a comedy sketch about college in 2026, you couldn’t write a better plot than this:
Getting flagged for an AI violation in a class literally titled Ethics.
📜 The Setting
The class was PHI 1610: Intro to Ethics.
On Day 1, the professor made it very clear:
“AI is forbidden. If you use ChatGPT to write a single sentence of your essay, you will be cast into the academic underworld. I have an AI detector and I know how to use it.”
Now, I don’t use AI to write essays for me. I write my own stuff (as evidenced by this blog).
What I do use AI for is building Python scripts to automate tedious administrative formatting — converting markdown citations, fixing margins, and auto-sorting bibliographies so I don’t spend 40 minutes doing manual labor in Microsoft Word.
🤖 The Script that Flew Too Close to the Sun
I wrote a small Python script to take my raw notes and format them into MLA 9th Edition.
To test it, I fed a section of my paper through a local LLM summarizer to generate a 2-sentence abstract. I accidentally left the abstract tag in the raw text file I turned in.
The professor ran the file through an “AI Detector” (which, as we all know, is basically a random number generator with a fancy UI).
The detector flagged my paper with a 98% AI Probability Score.
[My Paper] ──> [Turnitin / ZeroGPT] ──> "98% LIKELY WRITTEN BY A ROBOT 🤖"
│
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[Professor: 😡 ETHICS VIOLATION!]
👨⚖️ The Confrontation
I was called into the professor’s office.
Professor: “Ritesh, your paper on Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative was flagged as 98% AI-generated. How do you explain this ethical failure in an ETHICS class?”
Me (sweating profusely): “Professor, I swear I wrote the paper. I just wrote a Python script that calls a local Llama model via an API to format the header and generate an abstract…”
Professor (staring at me like I just spoke Ancient Aramaic): “A what model via an API?”
💡 The Lesson
- AI detectors don’t work, but trying to explain API calls and local LLM pipelines to a Philosophy professor is harder than solving the Riemann Hypothesis.
- If a class has a strict zero-tolerance policy on AI, keep your Python automation scripts far away from that folder.
- The irony of getting accused of un-ethical behavior while analyzing Kantian ethics is something I will cherish for the rest of my life.