At first, it seemed like routine academic misconduct.
A handful of students in my online “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” course showed all the signs of having outsourced their intellectual engagement to Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. It was similar to what I’d seen in previous semesters: vague, repetitive coursework submissions, which managed to meet the required word count without saying anything of substance; generic posts on the class’s online discussion board; “personal reflections” entirely devoid of personality; repeated references to the same handful of authors and textbooks, none of which I’d assigned. Garden-variety academic malfeasance, really, in the age of AI.
But things were about to get weirder.
