Yesterday, someone handed in a paper with a 55% rate of copied from elsewhere. At all the colleges and universities there is a plagiarism application called Turnitin. It shows me the source of their copying and compares the student vs. the copied article. In the non AI world, who could ever find time to do that type of research and analysis? Turnitin takes about five seconds. AI is already everywhere, machines doing things for us whether traffic lights, automatic doors, spellcheck…click tracks. One teacher called me and started complaining about the fear of student submissions arriving from ChatGPT. He changed his tune after I suggested he mark papers using ChatGPT. You can’t win fighting these things. I was pissed off when guitar tuners came out. I tune with my ear and like it. I thought a guitar tuner would disincline people to develop their ears. I didn’t think about other applications like tuning outside when loud noises make it impossible to hear a single string. For a long time now I hear machine driven music dominating popular music. I find it dull and embarrassing but most don’t. They also have nothing to compare it to. It is what they grow up on and rightly embrace its nowness. When I was growing up I didn’t like the music of times before me. It sounded so old, so meaningless. Now it’s my preference, so new, so meaningful. It was always there but I couldn’t hear it. When someone is caught from Turnitin displaying a high percentage of copying I give them the choice of rewriting it, or if they prefer, I can show it to my superiors where they risk being kicked out. It’s like a showdown. Do you want to pretend you aren’t caught or do you want to change your way of thinking?