Hey Reader,

Today in Innovating with AI Magazine, our intrepid reporter Toni Matthews-El digs into a fascinating double-game being played by the "AI detector" companies:

​Sell schools the AI detector, sell students the workaround.​

The full post is free and shareable – and we're investing in even more original journalism covering the AI industry in 2026.

To be honest, I haven't used AI detectors much since first playing with tools like GPTZero in 2024. I'm not grading papers for high school and college students, and I actually encourage my employees to write "boring" documents like proposals and software specs with the help of AI.

(Not this email, though - everything you receive from me is hand-written because my goal is to make a human connection with every IWAI reader.)

So, does it really matter if someone uses AI to write a paragraph?
A document?
A book?

And perhaps more importantly - what does it say about these "detector" companies that they are playing both sides, by selling both AI detectors and AI humanizers to avoid the detectors? Even the ones who try to elide this point have categories like "For Teachers" and "For Students" on their home page - giving away the double game.

To me, that seems like a gigantic red flag about their ethics and the value of either piece of software. 🚩

Thinking big-picture, I see two buckets of "writing" in daily life:

1. The boring stuff where "you just need the words on paper," like writing a statement of work for an AI consulting project. (We even have a proposal generator built into our AI Consultancy Project curriculum!) It is important for the words to exist so we can all agree upon the plan, but there is no need for beautiful prose. A lot of documents fall into this category.
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2. The stuff where you're making a human connection. This is why I respond personally (not with AI) when you reply to my emails. People are always shocked by that - but what is the point of an automated response when both of us want to actually have a real relationship? My approach is to "AI-ify" the other parts of my life/business so I can spend more time personally talking and emailing with students and the other important folks in my life.

I think the big challenge in high schools and universities right now is figuring out which one of these buckets you'd put an "assigned essay" into. I did a ton of essay writing as part of my history double-major (the other half was advertising) in college... but I honestly remember maybe one or two of those essays and would have a really hard time showing you that I learned "critical thinking" skills from those assignments.

Professors need to grade students, but at the same time, they need to make sure they're not just giving the students "work for work's sake" and are actually creating assignments and projects that teach something. This is a big part of why AI is disrupting universities - it is exposing the fact that a lot of assignments are not in fact very useful.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed reading history books in college (and still do today). The way my brain works, enjoying a book was way more enlightening and memorable than writing an essay about a book. More than 20 years later, I still remember a lot of detail from the books! (Just ask my son, who is frequently the unwilling recipient of the random historic facts stored deep in my brain.) But you can't really give a student a grade for enjoying a book.

To sum it up...

• Cheating on your homework is foolish and counterproductive.
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• Using AI for writing documents that are boring but necessary is a smart way to do good work in less time.
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• Even if homework feels "boring but necessary" to a student, their teacher will disagree 😉
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• If you have kids, do your best to help them enjoy learning and use AI as a tutor rather than a brain-replacement. Writing a paper "just because you have to" rarely results in actual education.

Dig into the full story (free and shareable), with original interviews from Toni Matthews-El, here:

Until next time,

– Rob
CEO of Innovating with AI