The Semester When Students Got Tired of AI Slop

My critical thinking class this spring has produced something I have not seen in several years: essays that sound like they were written by human beings.

The first two mini-essays show almost no signs of AI cheating. Students wrote about the theme of “optimization without integration” in the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” and about toxic positivity and infantilization in “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too.” These are not easy concepts. Yet the writing has been thoughtful, uneven in places, occasionally clumsy—in other words, unmistakably human.

Part of the explanation lies in the design of the assignments. I structured them as hybrids. Students begin with a single analytical paragraph about the episode itself. Then they pivot and connect the theme to their own lives. The second step is the key. AI can summarize television episodes all day long, but it has a harder time fabricating the peculiar messiness of someone’s actual life.

But the assignments alone do not explain the shift.

Conversations with students suggest something more interesting is happening: they are tired of AI. Not ethically troubled, not philosophically conflicted—simply exhausted. They complain about what they call AI slop: bloated paragraphs that say everything and mean nothing, prose that sounds like a motivational speaker trapped inside a thesaurus.

They are burned out on the smooth, inflated voice of the machine.

What they seem to want instead is something refreshingly primitive—authentic expression. The Black Mirror episodes help. The themes are sharp, strange, and slightly disturbing, which gives students something real to react to. They also appreciate that the assignments are short—well under 1,000 words. These essays function as warm-ups before the larger research papers later in the semester.

The result, at least so far, is encouraging.

After four years of watching AI creep into every corner of student writing, I may be seeing the beginning of a recalibration. Students appear to be treating AI less like a magic genie that produces instant essays and more like what it actually works best as: a tool for editing and cleanup.

I could be misreading the moment. Trends in education are famous for evaporating the second you start feeling optimistic.

But for now, the classroom sounds different.

The paragraphs have fingerprints on them again.