The videos are all over social media, making students an irresistible offer: Go ahead and let artificial intelligence (AI) do your homework – with the latest technology, you won’t get caught.
If you hate writing, you can avoid it.
Even established ed-tech companies are marketing with a wink and a nod.
These kinds of tutorials are now pervasive on TikTok and YouTube. They show students how to use tools known as humanisers and autotypers, which make it easier than ever to cheat. The videos – sometimes labelled ads, sometimes not – target college and high school students.
Humanisers rewrite AI-produced text to make it sound less robotic, formulaic and trite.
Autotypers slowly drip words and sentences into documents, making it appear as if papers were typed at a human pace when, in fact, they were produced by AI. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions.
Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect AI.
Colleges and K-12 schools are trying to keep up, with AI detection becoming a significant expense. But educators attempting to restrict the technology, worried about students failing to develop basic skills, are often lagging in what tech-industry leaders are calling a detection arms race.
In some cases, the same companies selling detection tools are also making apps that allow students to cheat, including by writing papers for them or rephrasing text written by others. The apps promise to help them avoid accusations of misconduct by scanning their work before they submit it, allowing them to rewrite passages identified as AI. Even honest students are often willing to fork over US$10 (RM40.77) to US$20 (RM81.54) per month for premium tools, since AI detectors sometimes flag legitimate work.
Jenny Maxwell, head of education at Superhuman, the AI company that makes Grammarly, called the race between detection and evasion “ultimately, a dead end.”
“Bigger cat, bigger mouse,” she said.
Instead, she urged educators to accept that most future writing would be produced in a partnership between artificial intelligence and human discernment.
‘Believable typos’
Even before AI chatbots, the Internet had made cheating easier, in part through the simple mechanism of copy-and-paste plagiarism.
Now, the landscape is more complex. About two-thirds of American students are using AI regularly for schoolwork, according to recent surveys. While only a small slice – about nine per cent – admitted to outright cheating in one large study, much AI use lies in an ethical grey area.
A recent College Board survey of professors found that three-quarters reported their students were using AI to write, and more than 90% of respondents were concerned about plagiarism and dishonesty. Many institutions have seen a sharp increase in student disciplinary cases for academic misconduct, much of it related to the use of AI.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the most popular AI tools among students.
But just beneath these behemoths is a roiling, fiercely competitive market of legacy ed-tech purveyors and tiny startups, all using social media to tell young people that their academic lives could be easier – much easier – if they embrace AI.
Some startups explicitly teach students how to cheat.
Meanwhile, established companies often urge students to use their tools responsibly as aids for studying, research, brainstorming, outlining and revision. But many of them are simultaneously producing technology that can easily be used to plagiarise and cheat. They put out tongue-in-cheek ads alluding to their ability to help students get away with something.
Smaller companies are sometimes more direct. In one TikTok video, Carter Smith, a young tech influencer known as CarterPCs, gleefully shows viewers how an autotyping and humanising app called Grubby AI can make it seem like a person naturally wrote an essay that was, in fact, produced by ChatGPT.
Smith has an enormous following of 6.5 million TikTok users. The video is not labelled an ad, though Smith had previously identified himself as a paid partner of Grubby AI.
The app, Smith, and the talent agency that represents him, Rakugo Media, did not respond to interview requests.
Autotypers are a response to the fact that many teachers and professors now check a document’s version history for signs of AI use. If 1,000 words suddenly appeared in a Word or Google document at 11:59 pm, it could mean the student pasted in text produced by a chatbot.
GrubbyAI and its many competitors are finding ways around those systems.
Dripwriter’s website says the app provides “believable typos and fixes” along with “background autotyping so your essay keeps working when you step away.”
Duey.ai, an app that describes itself as the “#1 autotyper for Google Docs,” tells customers that when they’re too tired or busy to focus, or out with friends, “The document looks like you wrote it.”
Dripwriter and Duey did not respond to interview requests.
It is a crowded market, in which upstarts constantly pop up. A TikTok video about another app, Typeflo, told students that they could relax, watch YouTube and eat a sandwich while their essays were produced for them.
Typeflo was registered to Daniel Huddleston, a professor at Emory University’s medical school. After being contacted by The New York Times, he said the app was developed and marketed by his teenage son, and he had not been fully aware of its social media presence.
The app and its social media accounts were then deleted. “I support the responsible and constructive use of AI tools,” Huddleston wrote in an email, “but I do not support academic misconduct or deceptive use of technology in educational settings.”
Another TikTok account, udoka_comet, features more than a dozen videos of a young woman discussing Comet, an AI-powered web browser from the company Perplexity. In one video, the woman says she doesn’t feel like writing a five-page high school lab report. She shows how Comet can do all the work for her, calling it “magic.”
Jesse Dwyer, a spokesperson for Perplexity, said the company had cut ties with an advertising agency that had “taken liberties” to increase online engagement, and that Perplexity had reminded social media partners to focus on “appropriate, responsible uses of Comet.” The browser can help with tasks educators might approve of, like formatting citations and creating study guides. But it can also complete assignments from start to finish.
(The New York Times is suing three AI companies, Perplexity, OpenAI and Microsoft, for copyright infringement.)
Tools that ‘do everything’
Some professors are increasingly concerned about Grammarly, an app that has existed for 17 years as a sort of muscular spell-check. It now offers an “authorship” tool that helps professors screen for AI misconduct, by analysing a document’s version history.
At the same time, the app allows students to generate writing from scratch, humanise text, and scan and replace phrases that could set off AI detectors.
Grammarly also provides a paraphraser that instantly rewrites any published text a student copies and pastes into a browser tab, which could be considered a form of plagiarism.
Grammarly advises students to use text-generation features “responsibly,” by citing each instance where AI was used in a paper. But the company also puts out ads that suggest students can use the app to pass off AI-produced writing as their own: “Detect AI text – it’s 2026, after all,” says one TikTok post. “Spot AI phrasing and choose edits that feel true to you.”
Like other AI executives, Maxwell, the head of education for Superhuman, which makes Grammarly, said cheating has always existed but represents only a small segment – she estimated 10% – of student AI use.
Still, frustrated educators say AI is short-circuiting student thinking. Several studies have shown that people who rely on AI can experience cognitive off-loading, a process in which they fail to build new skills, or their existing skills degrade.
George Cusack, director of AI academic initiatives at Carleton College, noted that Grammarly is sold to students as a benign helper when, in fact, “it’s a suite of tools that will do everything for you. It’s kind of shocking.”
He added, “I find the apps explicitly marketed as cheating less problematic than the ones marketed as ‘help.’” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
