Investigate & Improve: Why AI Can’t Write Your Paper

The Problem

Students are increasingly using AI chatbots to draft papers without guidance, generating essays complete with APA citations in seconds. While these drafts look polished on the surface, chatbots frequently invent sources, cite non-existent books, or attribute articles to researchers who never wrote them. Most students submit these papers without checking the references. Simply banning AI tools does not prevent this behavior, and warning students that AI makes mistakes rarely changes how they work.

The Idea

Instead of prohibiting AI, the "Investigate and Improve" protocol lets students discover AI errors firsthand. Working in small groups, students ask AI to generate a short biography about a celebrity or musician they already know well. Because they know the subject, students can spot inaccuracies as they investigate every claim and citation. They color-code the paper—highlighting verified facts in green, unconfirmed claims in yellow, and fake or wrong information in red—before replacing the bad content with real sources. This teaches students that the goal is verifying everything rather than viewing AI as forbidden.

The Steps

1. Hook (teacher demo, 5 min): on the projector, ask a chatbot: "Write a five-page biography of [musician] in APA style with citations." Show what comes back: a decent outline, far less than five pages, and a reference list. Ask: "Would you turn this in? How many of these sources do you think are real?"
2. Generate (groups, 10 min): each group picks a celebrity they already know a lot about, such as a musician or athlete. Prompt: "Write a 500-word biography of [person] with 5 APA citations, including links." Paste the result into a shared Google Doc.
3. Investigate (20 min): groups check every fact against what they know and every citation by searching for it. Highlight each claim green (verified), yellow (can't confirm), or red (wrong or invented). All editing happens in the Google Doc; searching is the only work done elsewhere. No AI tools, including Grammarly's AI features, during this step.
4. Debrief (10 min): tally the yellow and red. Teach the term hallucination: AI predicts likely-sounding text, so it can pair real researchers who never worked together or cite books that were never written. Ask: "Would your teacher have caught this? Would a college professor?"
5. Improve (homework or next day): groups fix the paper using only real, checked sources, in their own words.
6. Review the process: open the Google Doc's version history with each group to see what was added, changed and revised, and talk about it.
7. Close the loop: discuss why tricks like running a paper through a second AI, or asking AI to "add a few mistakes a student would make," don't build the skills students need. Plagiarism in college or trade school has serious consequences, and the habits start now. End by co-writing class norms: when AI is allowed, how to acknowledge it, and what stays your own work.