There’s a lot of talk on whether students are going to use AI to cheat, which. . . they definitely are going to.
AI has made it that much easier to cheat.
And it is frustrating to spend your time reading something that someone else did not spend their time writing.
Will there ever be technology that detects AI cheating? Hopefully.
But that being said, there is no type of cheat-blocking technology that make teaching the same as it was before AI.
So here are a few thoughts for teachers about how to approach cheating right now.
It is not *useful* to think of using new technology as cheating.
Don’t get me wrong: having AI write an essay that you then turn into your teacher and pretend you wrote it? That is cheating.
But using new technology in and of itself is not cheating.
I’m currently watching the CNN documentary series about the sixties.
One of the things this series made me realize is how important television was to the Civil Rights Movement.
There were things happening in the American South during the Jim Crow era that were hard to picture for anyone who didn’t see them up close.
Part of the strategic genius of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders was getting these dramatic scenes on television.
TV was a relatively new technology in the sixties. There were only a few channels. And there weren’t many ways to make sure something ended up on video in the first place, let alone on a screen where anyone could see it.
But if you passed these hurdles and got something on TV, you suddenly had the whole nation’s attention.
Fast forward to today: It’s 2026.
I recorded the video embedded in this post in a home office! And I had almost complete confidence that it would be possible to make it public.
It is just no longer that hard to get something on video, or to put it on a screen where anyone can watch it. What’s harder now is getting attention.
We’re a long way past the time when people were deciding between just a few TV channels.
There are so many different pulls on people’s focus that it’s hard to get even one person’s attention.
One of the reasons it is not cheating to use new technology is because our students are going to be in a world where that technology widely available.
This is going to bring up new challenges, and even if we don’t fully know what those are yet, students will have to deal with them.
There’s a Gray Area Around AI Use
Another reason it’s not useful to think of this technology as cheating is because there’s often a genuine gray area around when students are even using AI.
There will be students who are extremely meticulous in using technology exactly the way they’re allowed to. (Bless those students!)
And there will be students who are going to try to cheat and get around the rules no matter what.
But there are also students who don’t want to cheat, exactly. They just don’t feel that strongly about how they’re using technology. And this technology is now built into everything.
AI is built into so many of the tools that students use that it can almost be difficult to know where one thing stops and another begins.
- Is autocorrect cheating, because you’re not spelling things correctly on your own?
- If autocorrect is okay, how about autofill?
- How about when autofill can finish a whole paragraph for you?
- How about when an editing program can suggest a better way of phrasing your work?
Eventually, it becomes not your writing — but it’s not actually as clear as it might seem.
And then there’s something like spell check.
We are all so used to spell check that most teachers would be annoyed if there are a ton of obvious spelling mistakes in a student’s typed work.
There’s definitely going to be a version of that with AI — a version of human teachers thinking, why didn’t you have AI do some basic quality control before you handed it in to me?
But at the same time, we still have to answer one of the most fundamental questions in education.
How do we still make sure that students are doing the mental heavy lifting that makes their brains stronger?
Because you don’t just want the assignment done — you want the student to have done it.
Or at least, you want the student to have done the part that is most important for them to learn from.
A Starting Point: How Do You Teach a Student Who Isn’t Trying to Cheat?
With that in mind, a starting point for thinking about how to teach humans in the age of AI is this: How do you teach a student who is not trying to cheat in your class?
What do those students need to know for the future?
And how can you as a teacher help them get there — using AI when it makes sense and avoiding AI when it doesn’t?
One of the first things that is now important for teachers is to communicate clearly to students: What is an acceptable use of AI in your class?
What do you consider cheating?
What do you consider an acceptable amount of help from this new technology?
And how are students supposed to know the difference?
Guidelines for Students: How to Use AI Without Cheating
Here are some starter guidelines you can share with students to help them use AI in a way that supports learning rather than replacing it.
First, ask yourself: If I asked a human being to do this for me, would it be cheating?
It would not be cheating to ask a friend to help you brainstorm ideas, ask a parent to proofread your paper, ask for help finding alternative ways to say something, or ask for examples of a point you’re trying to make.
It also wouldn’t be cheating in most cases to ask a fellow human to help you fact-check something.
In fact, all of these are things that professional writers do for one another — and they’re also things that students with supportive family members at home might already be getting help with on their homework.
On the flip side, asking someone to write a paper for you and then turning it in as your own work would be cheating.
Second, ask yourself: Will feedback on this assignment give me actual feedback on whether I have learned something?
Here, teachers, it’s okay to share your own experience as the human who will be grading student work — and how you feel when an assignment takes you longer to grade than it took the student to work on.
But maybe frame it this way: your job as a teacher is to make sure students are learning something.
If the assignment doesn’t show whether students have learned anything, it’s a waste of teacher time — and students are also not getting what they need out of the class.
Third, ask yourself: What is the actual mental muscle that should be getting exercise from this assignment?
Are you getting that exercise? Are you smarter or mentally stronger for having done this assignment?
Of course that brings up an even harder question.
What does it mean to be mentally strong in the age of AI?
What should you even be teaching students these days?
That’s a topic for another post. Until then, thanks for reading.