The videos are all over social media, making students an irresistible offer: Go ahead and let A.I. 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 humanizers and autotypers, which make it easier than ever to cheat. The videos — sometimes labeled ads, sometimes not — target college and high school students.
Humanizers rewrite A.I.-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 A.I. They even fabricate typos, deletions and revisions.
Both tools can help students evade software designed to detect A.I.
Colleges and K-12 schools are trying to keep up, with A.I. 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 very 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 A.I. Even honest students are often willing to fork over $10 to $20 per month for premium tools, since A.I. detectors sometimes flag legitimate work.
Jenny Maxwell, head of education at Superhuman, the A.I. 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 A.I. 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 A.I. regularly for schoolwork, according to recent surveys. While only a small slice — about 9 percent — admitted to outright cheating in one large study, much A.I. use lies in an ethical gray area.
A recent College Board survey of professors found three-quarters reported their students were using A.I. to write, and over 90 percent 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 A.I.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the most popular A.I. tools among students.
But just beneath these behemoths is a roiling, fiercely competitive market of legacy ed-tech purveyors and tiny start-ups, all using social media to tell young people that their academic lives could be easier — much easier — if they embrace A.I.
Some start-ups 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 plagiarize 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 humanizing app called Grubby AI can make it seem like a person naturally wrote an essay that was, in fact, produced by ChatGPT.
Mr. Smith has an enormous following of 6.5 million TikTok users. The video is not labeled an ad, though Mr. Smith had previously identified himself as a paid partner of Grubby AI.
The app, Mr. 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 A.I. use. If 1,000 words suddenly appeared in a Word or Google document at 11:59 p.m., 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 auto typing 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 A.I. tools,” Dr. 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 over a dozen videos of a young woman discussing Comet, an A.I.-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 spokesman 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 A.I. 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 A.I. misconduct, by analyzing a document’s version history.
At the same time, the app allows students to generate writing from scratch, humanize text, and scan and replace phrases that could set off A.I. 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 A.I. was used in a paper. But the company also puts out ads that suggest students can use the app to pass off A.I.-produced writing as their own: “Detect A.I. text — it’s 2026, after all,” says one TikTok post. “Spot A.I. phrasing and choose edits that feel true to you.”
Like other A.I. executives, Ms. Maxwell, the head of education for Superhuman, which makes Grammarly, said cheating has always existed but represents only a small segment — she estimated 10 percent — of student A.I. use.
“I can’t solve the human behavior issue that is cheating or pushing the easy button,” she said. “It is out of our realm.”
Still, frustrated educators say A.I. is short-circuiting student thinking. Several studies have shown that people who rely on A.I. can experience cognitive offloading, a process in which they fail to build new skills, or their existing skills degrade.
George Cusack, director of A.I. 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.’”
Some A.I. companies pitch themselves as protectors of academic integrity. One of those is GPTZero, which was born in 2023 as a Princeton senior thesis, and claims to be 99 percent effective in detecting A.I. content, including some use of humanizers and autotypers.
At first, the company marketed itself mostly to schools. But more recently, it has flooded TikTok with videos from purported educators, in which they explain to students how GPTZero will be used to reveal cheating and get them in trouble. The goal is for students themselves to use the app.
One social media user known as studyingwithjake describes himself as a graduate teaching assistant who helps students understand how professors use A.I. detectors.
“I want to show you what this professor’s been hiding from students,” he says, as he walks viewers through the interface of GPTZero’s browser extension. The tool analyzes a document’s version history, detects A.I. and can provide writing feedback. Once downloaded, however, users will find that it can also generate a full academic paper in mere moments, complete with quotes and citations.
“If you grade your paper this way before you submit it, you’ll probably get a good grade on your paper,” the influencer says.
The man in the video is actually an Arizona-based marketer named Jake Austin Sivilla, who wrote on LinkedIn that he created a fictional persona in order to win millions of video views for his client, GPTZero.
Mr. Sivilla declined an interview request, and his LinkedIn post was deleted after The Times began inquiring about the videos.
Edward Tian, GPTZero’s co-founder and chief executive, said the company no longer worked with Mr. Sivilla and was moving toward working only with social media creators who are authentic educators or students. He also said there had been internal debate at GPTZero as to whether to allow the app to write school assignments from scratch, and that such capability might be limited in the future.
“Our mission is to preserve human quality and critical thinking in an age of A.I.,” he said.
Using A.I, but hating it, too
Jenny Ng, 20, just finished her sophomore year at Harvard, and said she earns the equivalent of a generous corporate salary from her side gig as a TikTok influencer. She made a video for Grammarly showing how she used the app’s A.I. chat ethically, to create a study guide for a statistics exam.
Ms. Ng said A.I. use is ubiquitous at Harvard, but she had also noticed backlash against young influencers who promote A.I.
“There is a level of shame” about using the technology, she said in an interview.
She also said her impression was that outright A.I. cheating was rare at Harvard, in part because professors have responded to chatbots by more heavily weighting oral and pen-and-paper exams in final grades.
Superhuman is developing software that will allow professors to limit and observe students’ uses of A.I. in research and writing, Ms. Maxwell said. Withholding A.I. entirely, she argued, was akin to educational malpractice, since students will be expected to use A.I. in the workplace.
“We’re doing a huge pedagogical upheaval in education,” she said, calling it a “burn it down moment. We’re just in the early stages.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research
