There are already cracks in the AI-detection fantasy. Tools like GPTZero and Turnitin's AI checker routinely wrongly accuse multilingual students, disabled students, and those who write in non-standard dialects. In these systems, the less a student "sounds like a college student," the more likely they are to be accused of cheating. Meanwhile, many students, especially those who are first-generation, disabled, or from under-resourced schools, use AI tools to fill in gaps that the institution itself has failed to address. What looks like dishonesty is often an attempt to catch up. Insisting on originality as a condition of academic integrity also ignores how students actually write. The myth of the lone writer drafting in isolation has always been a fiction. Students draw from templates, search engines, notes from peers, and yes, now from generative AI. If we treat all of these as violations, we risk criminalizing the ordinary practices of learning.
