Making the Grade: An AI Short Story

I've been messing around with a custom GPT and writing little stories. This is the start of the first one I wrote. -JB

Nervously, she fiddled with the hole in the knee of her jeans.

Not that she’d ever admit it to anyone, but she was nervous. She put a lot of effort into not caring. Into showing everyone that she didn’t give a fuck about school or what anyone thought of her.

She’d perfected the look: slouched in her seat, phone in hand, thumb scrolling absentmindedly through social media. It wasn’t just a distraction. It was armor.

Today, though, was different. Beside her was a door and on the other side of it sat the Vice Principal, and her dad. Usually, it was a 50/50 shot whether Mom or Dad would show up for these kinds of things. But of course, it had to be a Dad day. The day she was caught turning in an essay written by AI.

The voices on the other side of the door grew louder, still muffled but just clear enough to hear the tension. Her dad wasn’t doing much of the talking. A bad sign.

He was a talker, usually, especially when he was upset. But when he went quiet? That was when she knew he was really disappointed. And disappointment was worse than anger.

Anger burned hot and fast, a lecture you could tune out. Disappointment was ice-cold, the kind that stuck around long after the words stopped.

The door opened, and there he was. Silent, jaw clenched. It was as bad as she thought.

“Let’s go,” he said, barely looking at her as he turned and walked out. She followed, keeping a few paces behind, her heart racing, her fingers still glued to her phone screen as if it could somehow shield her from the inevitable lecture.

The car ride home was dead silent too, which only made things worse. Her mind spun with all the possible consequences: Was she suspended? Expelled? Was this what finally pushed her over the edge in her dad’s eyes?

Then, finally, he spoke. “You fucked up.”

Her fingers froze on her phone screen, her breath catching. He wasn’t wrong, but hearing it so bluntly threw her off. He had a lot of time to think about what to say, and he chose to F-bomb. She was expecting a long, exhaustive lecture. Something about effort and honesty, the usual dad stuff.?

“You didn’t even bother to run the essay through a plagiarism checker yourself?” he asked, shaking his head.

She blinked, trying to process. “I… what?”

“Let me guess. ChatGPT?” he continued, his voice steady but laced with frustration. “And probably nothing about your prompts that was at all different from every other student trying to write an essay for Social Studies. You think the school’s AI detector doesn’t pick up on that? They’re not idiots, and their tools are good enough to catch the lazy stuff.”

She was trying to play it cool, but this conversation wasn’t what she expected at all. Almost by reflex, she found herself being defensive.?

“I thought it’d be fine,” she muttered, still trying to wrap her head around the shift in the conversation. “Everyone does it.”?

He glanced at her, the ice still there but now mixed with something like exasperation. “You didn’t think. You could’ve used a custom GPT and had it write the essay so it mimicked your own voice. Or searched for a more advanced prompt that would be harder to detect with the usual plagiarism detectors. Run it through QuillBot, Undetectable, or GPTinf to make it less noticeable. And check it yourself for plagiarism with GPTZero, Turnitin, or Winston AI. The models are adaptable. You can fine-tune them. Feed them your previous work and your writing style. But you didn’t do that. You went with the first generic output and hoped no one would notice. Sloppy.” Another exasperated head shake.

He sighed loudly, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “Your teachers? They’re running basic detectors. They’re trained to spot the obvious stuff. Exact matches, repetitive phrasing, predictable sentence structure. Em-dashes and other giveaways. But there are ways around that. You could’ve used something with better contextual understanding. You feed it a prompt, guide it with specific instructions, and even throw in intentional mistakes. You should be trying to find a way to make it sound like a C+ social studies student made their best effort at an essay. Realistically, you should be telling the model to output an essay that is at best a B+ effort. You turned in an essay that may have been completely grammatically correct, but it has the word moreover twice in the first 250 words. I had to keep myself from laughing as Vice Principal Serious Pants lectured ME about cheating.”

She stared at the side of his head as he drove, half expecting this to be a trick. Surprised that she could feel comfortable looking at him at all. He was supposed to be angry, telling her how wrong it was to cheat, how she needed to work harder. Instead, he was giving her a masterclass in how to outsmart the system. It was still a lecture, but by some magic she was feeling confident rather than withering with guilt.?

“The teachers don’t even realize that what they’re using is only scratching the surface,” he continued, his voice calm and measured. “They get a quick demo on AI detection in their professional development days, and they think they’re experts. But they’re not. The models they use are surface-level, built to catch the easy stuff. The real work? That happens when you start customizing. Building models that learn from you and your inputs, not just from the generic dataset.”

She swallowed, unsure of what to say. This wasn’t the conversation she thought she’d be having. Her dad? Talking about hacking the system instead of scolding her for not trying harder? It’s not like he’s some brilliant software engineer.

She spent the rest of the car ride actually wondering what her dad did for a living. Something to do with marketing and software. But why did he seem to know so much about AI? He’s… old.?

They pulled into the parking garage, and he waited before shutting the car off. They both knew that once they were out of the car, she was no longer a captive audience.?

“No more half-assing it school,” he said, and turned to look at her. His eyes were serious, but there was something about the way he was staring at her. Like he was trying to communicate telepathically. She slowly started to nod, and as she did, she finally understood the subtext of what he was saying.

She suddenly felt a rush of confidence and motivation, like she had never felt before when it came to school. Inside, she was beaming, but she kept her cool, being careful not to be too obvious to her father.?

She stared at her phone again, stunned. Of all the things she’d expected on the ride home, a tutorial on cheating the AI detector wasn’t one of them. Some small part of her was actually looking forward to "writing" her next essay.

The urge to tell all of her friends was strong, but she knew better. As much as it was going to be difficult, she wasn't going to talk about this on Snapchat. This would be her little secret. Their little secret, really.