June 2, 2026
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My Students Can't Read
Professor says students won’t read 20 pages — and commenters turned it into an AI roast
TLDR: A professor says today’s students wouldn’t finish a 20-page reading that used to be standard. But commenters hijacked the story into an argument over whether the article was AI-written and blasted AI-detection tools as unreliable, unfair, and almost laughably bad.
A professor’s bleak claim — that six weeks into the semester, not one student finished a 20-page reading assignment that used to be totally normal — should have sparked a hand-wringing debate about attention spans, school standards, and whether phones have melted everyone’s brains. Instead, the comment section swerved hard into a far messier spectacle: was the piece itself written with artificial intelligence, and can anyone even tell anymore?
That’s where the real fireworks started. One commenter dropped an archive link, while another immediately pounced with the deliciously petty question: wouldn’t it be wildly ironic if the writer needed a robot to explain why students can’t read? Ouch. From there, the crowd piled onto so-called AI checkers, with multiple commenters basically declaring them junk science in a trench coat. One said the detectors are “all garbage” because they wrongly accuse real writers all the time. Another claimed they tested older, pre-chatbot writing and still got flagged. A third went even further, sneering that one detector’s score is basically a made-up number.
So the community mood wasn’t just worried — it was suspicious, snarky, and very online. The biggest hot take? The article’s sad message about reading collapse got hijacked by a newer panic: nobody trusts the tools judging what counts as human writing anymore. The jokes wrote themselves, and the comment section happily hit publish.
Key Points
- •A rhetoric and writing instructor assigned students a 20-page article six weeks into the term.
- •The assigned article length was the same as the instructor had used for the previous five years.
- •The instructor says the reading length was also comparable to what they had read as an undergraduate a decade earlier.
- •None of the students finished the assigned article.
- •The available text contains only the opening of the article because the rest is behind a paywall.