A recent survey found that 43% of college students have used ChatGPT to help with their assignments. A survey by the Center for Democracy & Technology found that more than half of teachers use tools to check if students’ work was done with the help of AI.

This creates a situation where teachers are trying to stop students from submitting AI-generated texts, while students are looking for ways to get around this and… cheat. Or really — is this really cheating?

In This Article:

The State of Academic Writing in 2025

The conversation around academic writing is shifting to focus on how it’s written instead of what it’s about. This is causing problems for students and teachers.

Most universities now require all assignments to go through AI detection software
However, students often report being flagged for work they wrote themselves
Teachers spend a lot of time dealing with false positives, instead of focusing on teaching

However, one could argue that it shouldn’t matter how a writer wrote something. Whenever a new technology emerges that automates part of any creative process, it is met with backlash.

This happened when Photoshop and digital painting replaced brushes and paint. It also happened when autocorrect allowed us to stop worrying about spelling and when Grammarly came out and allowed us to automatically correct grammatical mistakes.

Now, the same debate is revolving around tools like Overchat AI, that students use to humanize text.

How We Found Ourselves in This Situation

Panic set in when ChatGPT was launched in late 2022. Teachers realized that students could instantly generate essays. Schools immediately banned AI tools.

“However, people quickly learned that ChatGPT isn’t a good writer, and when the first AI detectors emerged, they became very accurate very quickly. In response, AI humanizers became some of the most popular tools,” said Andrew Dyuzhov, CEO of Overchat AI, a company that develops AI productivity tools.

It’s similar to when calculators first appeared in classrooms and some schools completely banned them. The same thing is happening with AI writing tools.

This Human vs. AI-Generated Debate Misses the Whole Point

If a student writes an essay without reading it, they won’t learn anything. But a student who uses AI to organize thoughts, check grammar, and improve clarity is simply using available tools effectively. Professional writers use AI the same way they used to use tools like spell-check or grammar guides. It helps with structure, finds errors, and speeds up editing.

The most important thing is whether students can think critically, form arguments, and analyze information. These skills are important in any job.

Why It’s OK to Use AI Tools for Writing

It’s as silly to avoid artificial intelligence for writing in 2025 as it was to avoid spell-check in 2005. AI writing tools are now used by people in every professional field.

If you don’t learn these tools when you graduate, you’ll have a hard time getting a job. As AI writing models get better, they’ll be able to produce high-quality content quickly. Even if you spend 48 hours on an article, someone else will be able to produce the same quality piece in 8 hours because they rely on AI to speed up the writing process. This includes using AI humanizers.

How to Humanize Text and Essays

First, most AI humanizers work on proprietary algorithms. Start by finding the right tool. Some humanizers focus on writing style, offering formal or informal options, while others allow you to customize this to a degree. Try out a few tools to see which one you prefer.

Second, understand that humanizers make small changes to remove signs of AI automation. They do this by changing sentence structure, finding synonyms for words that AI models overuse, and introducing natural imperfections. However, they can’t fact-check or add expertise. If the original AI-generated text contains incorrect facts or lacks an interesting angle, a humanizer won’t help.

That’s why it’s best to do a humanization pass at the end, once the structure and content are strong.

The process of actually using the tool is simple:

Paste your text
Click Humanize
Review the result

Lastly, submit the text to an AI detector to check if the AI score has improved. You may need to humanize the text multiple times to achieve the desired score. As a general guideline, aim for an AI score below 15% or a human score above 75%, depending on the tool.

Bottom Line

AI-generated texts are likely to become more common. It’s hard to imagine many people choosing to spend hours on writing when the same result can be achieved in minutes. At least, that’s the case for the average person.

This suggests that the future of academic writing lies not in creating better detectors and banning AI text, but in finding ways to leverage AI writing without diminishing the rewards of learning. Perhaps we will soon see humanizers not as a way to bypass AI detectors but as useful editing tools that improve readability and give any text that extra polish—like Grammarly, but better.