When 80% of your class admits to using AI, but you actually wrote your post yourself and still got flagged… the paranoia about your own writing style becomes real

My online professor recently accused about 70% of our class of using AI on the first discussion assignment, and apparently around 80% of students admitted they did. The whole situation has made the class feel really weird.

The course is an online anthropology class called Faces of Culture. The workload is pretty light: a weekly discussion post and a quiz. For the first assignment, I did what I normally do. I read the source the professor provided, wrote my response based on it, submitted the discussion post, and completed the quiz.

At first I got 100% on the discussion post. Later that same day, the professor posted an announcement saying it was “blaringly obvious” that many students had used AI to generate their responses. He told anyone who used AI to email him so he could partially restore their points.

When I checked my grade again, my 100 had been changed to a 0 with a comment saying my response was too similar to another student’s to be a coincidence and that I needed to submit my own work.

I immediately emailed him explaining that I actually wrote my response myself using the single source he required. Thankfully he replied later that day and restored my grade, but the whole experience made me uneasy.

A few days later he announced a new policy: discussion posts are now video responses instead of written ones. In the announcement he also said that about 80% of the class admitted to using AI for the first assignment.

That honestly shocked me. I understand people using AI to brainstorm or clarify ideas, but copying and pasting AI-generated text for a short discussion post seems risky, especially since our school’s policy prohibits it.

Now the strange part is that I’m suddenly paranoid about my own writing, even though I do not use AI for assignments. I tend to write in a pretty formal style, and after getting flagged once, I worry it might happen again.

What makes things even more confusing is that some classes strongly discourage AI, while others encourage students to use it as a learning tool. Right now it feels like there is no clear standard, and everyone is just trying to figure out where the line actually is.