Professors Are Tearing Their Hair Out Over AI Detectors ↗
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.September 21, 2026, 7 AM ET ShareSave Timothy Paustian has tried everything to stop his students from writing essays with AI. When ChatGPT first came out, Paustian, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, tested AI detectors that promised to flag machine-generated prose. They were “comically bad,” he told me. Then he started sneaking invisible prompts into his assignments that only chatbots would respond to.