Kwame Anthony Appiah has written a column called “The Ethicist” for the The New York Times Magazine since 2015. He teaches philosophy at New York University. Readers send in questions to Appiah for his answers. This piece appeared September 10, 2025.
I volunteer with our local historical society, which awards a $1,000 scholarship each year to two high school students who submit essays about a meaningful experience with a historical site. This year, our committee noticed a huge improvement in the quality of the students’ essays, and only after announcing the winners did we realize that one of them, along with other students, had almost certainly used artificial intelligence. What to do? I think our teacher liaison should be told, because A.I. is such a challenge for schools. I also feel that this winner should be confronted. If we are right, that might lead her to confess her dishonesty and return the award. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
The rise of A.I. chatbots — and now Microsoft Word’s Copilot feature — is making it harder to use essays to assess candidates for scholarships, grades and jobs. In fact, because much of the workplace will soon involve prompting machines and editing their output, traditional essay writing may no longer be seen as an essential skill. One big worry about all this is that researching and drafting a paper on their own has long been one of the ways students actually learn material and form their own views about it.
Your society’s prize is no doubt meant to reward that process, not just a polished final product. And yet unless your historical society explicitly barred A.I. use, the winner might not have thought she was doing anything wrong. Perhaps she provided information about a historical site and her experience of it and then refined what the machine produced.
Before generative A.I., of course, students could already run their work through digital spelling, grammar and style checkers. Earlier still, they might have had a parent or an older sibling make improvements. Now services like Grammarly boast that they help users construct an essay interactively. “Writing is utter solitude,” Kafka is said to have lamented, “the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” For students today, it may feel more like a cozy group chat with an algorithm.
What happened this year should be taken as a wake-up call, rather than a crime scene. If you’re going to evaluate essays written without supervision, it’s wise to talk to the students and confirm that they actually understand the ideas in their papers. For now, let the teacher liaison know that many of the submissions appeared to rely on generative A.I. But I wouldn’t push for a confession from the winner. What matters is letting students know what kinds of assistance are off-limits and why producing work on their own is (as you and I believe) still worth doing.
If the contest continues in its current form, however, you may simply be rewarding those crafty enough to conceal their silicon Cyranos. I suspect that it’s time to rethink the format. That might mean shifting to supervised writing sessions or oral presentations about a site or something else entirely. The goal would still be to encourage young people to explore the past — to research, reflect, and communicate. But to do that, the contest itself may need a rewrite.
