March 1, 2025
I read this article today on huffpost.com, “I Asked My Students To Write An Essay About Their Lives. The Reason 1 Student Began To Panic Left Me Stunned.” It got me thinking about if my students were using AI to write their papers and if Chatgpt has improved since I last used it in late 2022. I was impressed by the quality of the output back then, but I could tell by the writing style and lack of specific dates and places that the output I was reading was not written by a human. I also knew that this hunch wasn’t proof, so if I found a paper that I felt was written by Chatgpt, I would just ask my students who I assumed were using it to rewrite their essays.
Due to retirement and low enrollment I haven’t taught for 2 years. This Winter 2025 however I was asked to teach two classes. According to google, the Chatgpt Initial release was November 30, 2022 and the Stable release was launched February 6, 2025. I decided to revisit Chatgpt by giving it prompts for the essays I assign to my students.
Prompt: What is it like to grow up white in America?
Chatgpt: Growing up white in America comes with a range of experiences that vary based on location, class, family dynamics, and individual circumstances. However, in a broad sense, white Americans often experience certain societal privileges, such as being less likely to face racial discrimination in areas like education, policing, and employment. Many white children grow up seeing people who look like them in leadership roles, media, and history books, which can contribute to a sense of belonging and normalcy.
That said, white Americans also experience struggles based on other factors like poverty, regional culture, or family background. For example, a white child growing up in a wealthy suburb will have a very different experience from one growing up in a working-class rural town or an inner-city neighborhood. Factors like education access, community resources, and personal identity all shape an individual’s experience.
Not all that impressive. However, a student could use it as an outline and then expand on it.
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I then gave it a better prompt and got much better results.
Prompt: What is it like to grow up white in America in the first person?
Chatgpt: Growing up white in America, for me, meant that race wasn’t something I thought about much—at least not at first. It wasn’t that I was taught to ignore it, but more that I was rarely forced to confront it. The faces in my schoolbooks, on TV, and in positions of power often looked like mine, so I never questioned whether I belonged. No one assumed I was out of place in a nice neighborhood, and if I walked into a store, I wasn’t followed around.
As a kid, I heard phrases like “hard work pays off” and “everyone has the same opportunities,” and for a long time, I believed them without question. The world seemed fair. If I got in trouble, I could usually talk my way out of it with a warning. If I succeeded, no one suggested it was because of anything other than my effort.
It wasn’t until I got older that I started to see the gaps in that version of reality. I saw how my friends of color had different experiences—being pulled over more often, being questioned more harshly, or just being assumed to be less capable. At first, I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. It was uncomfortable, because it meant that the world I thought was fair wasn’t fair for everyone.
But growing up white also meant I had the choice to engage with these realities or ignore them. That’s a privilege in itself. I could walk away from conversations about race without it affecting me directly. I didn’t have to worry about how the world saw me because of my skin color. And realizing that wasn’t about feeling guilty—it was about understanding the way the world works and figuring out how to move through it in a way that acknowledges and challenges those differences.
Everyone’s experience is different, but that was mine.
Very impressive. Still, no dates or specific places given so that is the one key feature that Chatgpt always omits. However, everything is in first person so much more believable.
Would it work with a specific city? Yes.
Prompt: What is it like to grow up white in San Jose, Ca in the first person?
ChatGPT: Growing up white in San Jose, CA, meant being surrounded by diversity but not always understanding my place in it. The city is a melting pot—Asian, Latino, Indian, Black, Middle Eastern—so from a young age, I was used to hearing different languages in the hallways, eating foods from all over the world at my friends’ houses, and celebrating holidays I didn’t grow up with. It wasn’t unusual—it was just normal.
But being white in San Jose also meant being aware, even subtly, that I was part of a smaller group. In some schools, white kids were the minority, but it didn’t feel like a disadvantage. If anything, I never felt “out of place” in the way some of my nonwhite friends did in other settings. The world still reflected me—I saw people who looked like me on TV, in government, in history books. I didn’t have to think about my race much unless someone pointed it out.
I remember little things—friends joking that white people didn’t season their food, or that I probably only listened to country music (which wasn’t true). It was all in good fun, but it was the first time I realized that whiteness had its own cultural assumptions. But unlike some of my classmates, I never worried that my race would be held against me in a job interview or with the police.
At the same time, being white in San Jose didn’t feel like being part of some dominant ruling class. It wasn’t the South or the Midwest, where whiteness felt like the default. Here, success wasn’t just a white thing. The wealthiest families I knew were often tech entrepreneurs from immigrant backgrounds, and the smartest kids in my class were usually first-gen students whose parents had sacrificed everything to be here. It challenged the idea I had grown up with—that America was simply a meritocracy where “anyone can succeed if they work hard.”
I didn’t feel guilty about being white, but I did start to realize that my experience of “normal” wasn’t universal. I could afford to not think about race if I didn’t want to. My nonwhite friends didn’t have that luxury. And the more I understood that, the more I saw the quiet ways privilege worked—not in some big, dramatic way, but in the small, everyday moments that shaped how we moved through the world.
Seriously impressive.
However, no dates or specific places were mentioned, but a human would most likely use dates and specific places, so another way to tell this wasn’t written by a human.
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Would Chatgpt be able to write about specific places and dates? Yes.
I changed the prompt to:
Prompt: What is it like to grow up white in San Jose, Ca in the first person with specific dates and places mentioned?
Chatgpt: Growing up white in San Jose, CA, in the early 2000s felt like living at the intersection of a lot of different worlds. I was born in 1996 and spent most of my childhood in the Almaden Valley—one of the more suburban, upper-middle-class neighborhoods on the south side of the city. The streets were lined with trimmed lawns, and the schools—Simonds Elementary and later Bret Harte Middle School—were some of the best in the area. Most of my neighbors were white, but by the time I got to middle school, the classrooms were a mix of kids—Asian, Latino, Indian, and a handful of Black students.
I don’t remember thinking about race much when I was younger. My world felt pretty comfortable. We’d have Friday night pizza at Round Table on Blossom Hill, and weekends were spent playing Little League at Los Alamitos Park. I was taught that San Jose was one of the most diverse cities in the country, but it never really clicked what that meant because diversity just felt like the default.
High school at Leland (2009–2013) was when things started to shift. By then, I could see how race played out in small but noticeable ways. The white kids still made up a lot of the social circles at school, but the academic stars—the ones who seemed destined for Stanford or Berkeley—were mostly Asian and Indian. My friend Miguel always joked that he had to work twice as hard to prove himself in AP classes because teachers expected him to be just another Latino kid skating by. I never doubted that my hard work mattered, but I also never had to wonder if someone would assume I didn’t belong in honors classes.
Downtown San Jose, with its mix of taquerias, tech startups, and homeless camps, felt like a different city entirely from where I lived. My family would go to Sharks games at the SAP Center or eat at Original Joe’s on special occasions, but those trips always felt like venturing out of our bubble. I knew San Jose was a tech hub, but that world felt distant—like something happening on the other side of Highway 85, where the Google buses picked people up.
By the time I left for college, I realized that being white in San Jose was its own kind of privilege—one that was easy to overlook because it didn’t always feel like power or dominance. It was more like having the option to blend in or step back when conversations about race or inequality came up. I could walk through Oakridge Mall or the Willow Glen farmers’ market without ever thinking about whether I belonged there. I didn’t have to carry the weight of my skin color into every space I entered.
Looking back, San Jose taught me that whiteness isn’t always about what you have—it’s about what you don’t have to think about.
Seriously impressive. I’d probably give this paper an A
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Would it work with an Asian ethnic group and change the places and experiences appropriately? Yes. I changed the prompt to:
Prompt: What is it like to grow up Vietnamese American in San Jose, Ca in the first person with specific dates and places mentioned?
Chatgpt: Growing up Vietnamese American in San Jose, CA, in the 1990s and 2000s meant always feeling like I was living in two different worlds. At home in our apartment off Tully Road, near the Lion Plaza shopping center, everything was in Vietnamese—Ba and Má spoke it, the TV was always tuned to Paris By Night, and the smell of fish sauce and lemongrass clung to my clothes. But the moment I stepped into the classroom at Shirakawa Elementary, English took over, and I had to navigate a world that didn’t always understand where I came from.
In the early days, I was embarrassed by how thick my parents’ accents were when they talked to my teachers, how my lunch smelled different from the sandwiches other kids brought. At lunchtime, I’d sometimes trade my bánh mì for a friend’s Lunchables, just so I wouldn’t stand out. But at home, it was a different story. Sundays meant crowded dinners with my cousins at Grand Century Mall, where we’d slurp bowls of bún bò Huế while our parents gossiped over cà phê sữa đá.
By the time I got to Yerba Buena High School in the early 2000s, being Vietnamese in San Jose didn’t feel like being “different”—it was just part of the city’s rhythm. My friends were mostly other Vietnamese kids, but also Mexican, Filipino, and Indian. We’d meet up at Eastridge Mall after school, grab food at Pho Kim Long on Story Road, or drive down to the Santa Teresa McDonald’s to hang out in the parking lot. But even though we were all from immigrant families, I started noticing how different our struggles were. My Mexican friends talked about being undocumented. My Black friends got followed around in stores. My worries were different—would my parents ever let me move out? Would they understand why I didn’t want to take over the family nail salon?
At home, there was always pressure—pressure to get good grades, to make something of myself. My parents came here as refugees, and they reminded me all the time: “We sacrificed everything for you.” That meant no sleepovers, no dating, and definitely no talking back. I remember arguing with my mom once about wanting to go to a school outside of San Jose, and she just sighed, “Why would you leave when we worked so hard to get here?”
Looking back, growing up Vietnamese American in San Jose was complicated. It was knowing I was part of a huge, thriving community—seeing my language on storefronts, my culture celebrated at Tet Festival in History Park—but also feeling like I had to prove myself in a country that didn’t always see us. It was learning how to switch between being “Vietnamese enough” at home and “American enough” everywhere else. And even now, as an adult, I still feel like I’m figuring out what that balance means.
Seriously impressive. I’d probably give this paper an A.
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I ask the class to use terminology learned in class in their papers. Will Chatgpt handle this request? Yes.
Prompt: What is it like to grow up Vietnamese American in San Jose, Ca in the first person with specific dates and places mentioned and the terms racial formation and hegemony used?
Chatgpt: Growing up Vietnamese American in San Jose, CA, in the 1990s and early 2000s meant constantly navigating racial formation—the way race was socially constructed around me—and the hegemonic expectations of both American and Vietnamese cultures. My family lived in an apartment complex off Tully Road near Senter, right by Lion Plaza, where the smell of fresh bánh mì from Lee’s Sandwiches mixed with the herbal scent of Chinese medicine shops. This area was the heart of Little Saigon, where everything—signs, conversations, newspapers—was in Vietnamese. At home, I was expected to follow the hegemonic values of my parents’ generation: respect elders, get straight A’s, and never question authority. But once I stepped into Shirakawa Elementary School in the late ’90s, the rules changed.
In school, I saw how racial formation worked in real-time. Vietnamese kids were expected to be quiet and good at math, Mexican kids were assumed to be troublemakers, and the few Black students often got sent to the principal’s office for things my white classmates could get away with. I remember a substitute teacher mispronouncing my name and laughing, telling me, “You should pick an American name, like Kevin.” It was a small moment, but one that showed me how hegemony works—not through force, but through the subtle pressure to conform.
By the time I got to Yerba Buena High School in the early 2000s, I started noticing the different ways racial formation played out even within my own community. Some Vietnamese kids tried to assimilate, joining leadership clubs and getting into Berkeley, while others leaned into the gang culture that was becoming more visible in East San Jose. I saw it at Eastridge Mall, where older Vietnamese guys in baggy clothes and gold chains hung out near the arcade, while their younger siblings worked at food court stalls, trying to live up to their parents’ dreams. At home, my parents enforced their own kind of hegemony—strict curfews, no dating, and constant reminders that they had “sacrificed everything” for me to succeed.
Despite San Jose’s diversity, I could see how white hegemony still shaped everything. At job interviews, I watched my mom switch from her confident Vietnamese self to a nervous woman apologizing for her accent. At school, history lessons barely mentioned the Vietnam War from our perspective—just the American version of it. Even though San Jose had the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, it still felt like we were just guests in someone else’s country.
Looking back, growing up Vietnamese American in San Jose meant constantly negotiating between two racial formations—the one that white America imposed on me and the one my parents carried over from Vietnam. It meant understanding hegemony not as something distant, but as something that shaped my name, my career choices, and the way I learned to exist in both spaces. And even now, I still feel like I’m figuring out how to challenge it while staying true to who I am.
“Absolutely outstanding paper! Great job!” is what I would write in the comments section for this student’s paper, not knowing it was generated in about 5 seconds with the proper prompt for Chatgpt. This is a profound discovery that a student can have a program write them an A level paper in a few seconds.
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Conclusion:
Well, if you know how to prompt Chatgpt, it will give you amazing results that are indistinguishable from a human. I imagine I’m grading papers generated by AI by, well, anybody’s guess really, 25%? 50%? 75% of my students.
Banning or prohibiting the use of AI in our syllabus is almost meaningless. The Dean of Student Affairs and Academic Integrity Departments still do not have a statement about the use of AI in schoolwork on the school’s website. When I’ve reported students in the past for cheating, nothing really seems to happen. When I specifically ask what they are doing, they become evasive and say they can’t tell me anything due to student privacy concerns. There was one quarter a student cheated on every assignment. I reported each instance weekly. Nothing happened. I asked them to drop him, they wouldn’t. I told them I’d drop him. They said I couldn’t. They just leave it up to the professors to police it and figure out the best way to incorporate it into our teaching. Yes, incorporate it, not ban it. Banning it I see is meaningless.
So the key issue really is not how we deal with AI being used to write essays, it’s how do we accurately and effectively assess a student’s academic performance in our classes? Instead of an essay, maybe a selfie video answering the same prompts but looking directly at the webcam? This of course could just be memorized Chatgpt output so no real improvement. In fact, synthesia can already create a video from a prompt. Honestly, I am out of ideas and think maybe we just ignore the use of AI and keep teaching in ignorance? If the school doesn’t give us any better alternative, then that’s what will be done.
As a student, I’m glad I graduated from undergrad and grad school before AI was available. I did all the work myself. Grammerly wasn’t even available until 2009, long after I graduated. I did use the Microsoft Word spell checker feature. I guess Chatgpt is this generations spell checker? As a student today, why not use all the tools available to them? After all, I used a spell checker on every paper I wrote. I imagine students from 2009 used Grammerly, and students from 2023 on use Chatgpt?
Clearly, there is nothing we can do to stop our students from using Chatgpt to write their essays, that’s the reality. For now, I will just grade as if Chatgpt doesn’t exist.
To be fair, I have used AI in a job related task. I wanted to create a logo for my pickleball coaching business. I figured I had to get a logo, so I started searching for a graphic designer. I found one and was quoted $1000-$1500 with charges for each iteration after a certain amount. I had only a vague idea of what I wanted. It wasn’t the cost that made me reluctant to proceed, but I wanted to avoid going back and forth with the designer to get something I liked. I could barely articulate with any specificity about what I wanted, so I felt it was going to be a tedious job. Anyways, I found design.com and typed in “pickleball coach lee” and got over 10,000 logo images in about 2 seconds. I picked the top 3 and then found http://www.freelancer.com and hired an adobe illustrator expert to work with the 3 designs I had to distill it down to one and then refine it until I get something I’m happy with. The cost was $15/hour and ended up spending $500 total for multiple logos and images. I guess it depends on the situation, but in this scenario AI saved me a lot of time and money. In an academic situation, if a student uses it consistently, they will have no critical thinking or writing skills. That’s a major concern, though I’m sure there are more.
Canon M Cameras 