AI Writing: Who Is the 'Crackdown' For?

May 2023: at Texas A&M University, the joy of graduation turned into fear. An incident where a professor sweeping suspicion of "submitted essays written with ChatGPT" instantly threatened students ability to obtain degrees. Texas A&M Commerce campus: immediately after graduation ceremony, Professor Jared Mumm sent emails to all students in his course issuing "X" (ungraded) grades claiming "ChatGPT-written essays confirmed." Mumm input student assignments into ChatGPT and asked "did AI write this?" -- giving 0 points to essays where AI answered "yes." "I do not grade ChatGPT writing. I need to see what you learned, not what the computer learned" as a comment. Students immediately pushed back. One student demonstrated they personally wrote the essay using Google Docs edit history but was still questioned. The fundamental methodological error: Mumm used ChatGPT itself as a detection tool -- asking an AI language model to identify AI-written text is not a validated detection methodology; ChatGPT frequently claims to recognize its own patterns in human-written text, generating false positives; using a language model output as evidence in an academic misconduct proceeding violates basic evidentiary standards. The university response: Texas A&M reversed all penalties and conducted an investigation into the professor approach -- ultimately acknowledging that the students were not fairly assessed. The broader lesson: the Texas A&M case demonstrates how rushed institutional response to AI writing can create injustice when educators use unvalidated detection methods without understanding their error rates and limitations.