With the digital age making it so easy for students to use AI-generated content for their essays, there are significant risks to doing so instead of submitting a custom written essay. Even though AI tools can offer you a free and incredibly quick solution, the economic choices of this decision go far beyond the immediate savings you will experience. This analysis explores the very significant short and long-term financial risks of choosing to submit AI-generated content in violation of academic rules instead of a custom essay.
In fact, the apparent cost benefits of submitting an AI-generated essay are likely very misleading in the short-term. Even though most AI essay generators are either free or very cheap, premium versions of these platforms, which leave the same signs of detection, can cost between $20 and $100 per month. In contrast, custom essays can cost anywhere from $15 to $50 per page depending on spacing, topic, and other factors. While it may appear much cheaper to use an AI-generated essay, doing so has hidden costs that are both financially and personally dangerous for you.
Because universities now use sophisticated systems to detect AI essays, this makes the identification of machine-generated content almost inevitable. When a student is caught using AI-generated work, a cascade of academic and financial penalties will follow. These can include the following:
- Academic Suspension: If you are suspended for a semester, your graduation will be delayed by four to six months, and beyond your lost tuition, you will lose potential earnings of $20,000-$30,000 for an entry-level position
- Lost tuition: If you fail a course because you submit an AI-generated paper, you are likely to lose between $3,000 and $5,000 in relation to the costs of re-enrolling in the course as you will forfeit the tuition you paid prior to your suspension.
- Scholarship Revocation: If you are found guilty of academic misconduct, your scholarship will immediately be revoked. This could cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your eligibility if you are a student athlete.
Beyond these university-related consequences of submitting an AI-generated paper, there are also economic consequences that will persist into your professional life. For one, reference verification processes and background checks will involve looking at your academic records and, because academic dishonesty is a permanent mark on your record, will likely make you lose the best job opportunities. Your career advancement will be significantly limited because you will never be able to even get your foot in the door for these higher paying jobs. Additional economic consequences of submitting an AI-generated essay include:
- Graduate school admission: You are unlikely to be admitted toi any graduate program if you have an academic dishonesty mark on your academic record and this can limit your earning opportunities if your career requires graduate education.
- Professional certification: You will not be able to obtain certain professional certifications, for example joining the bar to be a lawyer or becoming a chartered accountant, if you have a permanent record of academic dishonesty. These high-paying jobs will be permanently out-of-reach.
- Potential job loss: If it is ever discovered that you have an academic dishonesty record that you attempted to hide, you could be fired with cause or even face criminal charges if you hid this record to gain a job in law enforcement or obtain a security clearance for national security or government work.
In other words, and in the same way that artificial intelligence is creating significant economic dangers, you will face massive economic challenges if you ever submit an AI-generated essay for academic purposes. At the end of the day, the best solution is for you to write your own essays and coursework instead of relying on AI. That said, we know that many of you are simply too busy to complete this busy work or that you may be incredibly smart but lack writing skills or otherwise have a disability that your university is not providing appropriate accommodation for.
If you’re a smart student who wants to maximize their return-on-investment, choosing a custom essay is likely your best bet. Given that these are written by humans and are never plagiarized, the changes of being flagged for either plagiarism or AI content are near-zero. The worst-case scenario for submitting a custom essay is that you might be asked to conduct an oral interview with your professor if they don’t believe you wrote it. As the burden of proof regarding plagiarism and academic misconduct lays with the university, rather than with you, the school has to prove that you did not write your essay. This is something that can be easily done with AI-generated content but that cannot be done with custom essays written by highly professional academic ghostwriters.
Ultimately, AI is creating a dystopia, but you need not let your academic life become one. If you aren’t wary of AI itself, you should be terrified of the economic consequences of using AI to finish your coursework. If you submit an AI-produced essay, you will certainly be caught and charged with academic misconduct. In fact, there are so many false positives in AI detection that you might be accused even if you’re innocent. In the meantime, a custom essay is your best bet to avoid losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for being cheap and lazy.