Teacher found ChatGPT response in senior’s ‘Reducing Homelessness’ paper — but the student’s prompt made them want to give two zeroes
As artificial intelligence becomes more common in classrooms, many teachers are finding themselves caught between frustration and fascination. A Reddit user and chemistry teacher, who goes by u/BlackOrre, faced a similarly hilarious situation when they saw the English essay about "reducing homelessness" from a senior student. The funniest part is not even the cheating itself, but the unbelievably careless way students expose that they never fully read what they were turning in. They shared the same over the community r/Teachers on October 4, 2025.
Student prompted ChatGPT to write about "homeliness" and not "homelessness."
by u/BlackOrre in Teachers
In one particularly hilarious end-of-semester incident, a senior student was assigned an English paper about reducing homelessness. She smartly decided to use the AI tool. However, she had one job — to enter the topic correctly, which she failed to do. Instead of "homelessness," she wrote "homeliness." And apparently, she didn't bother to double-check the difference before submitting the final draft. The situation became even funnier when the paper accidentally included ChatGPT’s prompt as well. It read, “Certainly! Here’s a sample academic-style paper on homeliness (I assume you meant ‘homeliness,’ and not ‘loneliness’).” It is like even AI was smart enough to know there was something wrong, but not smart enough to catch the actual error. That line alone reportedly sent the teacher into uncontrollable laughter.
The professor jokingly admitted, “I feel like the Senior English teacher should give two zeroes. The first one should be for plagiarism. The second one should be for whatever this was." One cannot deny that there is something oddly fascinating about how AI mistakes are now becoming their own category of classroom comedy. Especially when students are so rushed or uninterested in the assignment that they fail to proofread the very evidence sitting right in front of them. According to the educator, the student had always been notoriously lazy whenever essays or reports were involved, but even then, they “didn’t expect her to be so inept” that she would accidentally leave ChatGPT’s correction sitting inside the final paper itself.
If this story alone wasn't funny enough, educators in the comment section added their own anecdotes to double the laughter. For example, u/kylejk0200 said, "I had 8th graders who would just copy/paste from websites but didn’t bother to change the formatting, so the essay would all be in different fonts and sizes and colors." u/Dikaneisdi wrote, "My film lecturer at university told us about a previous student who turned in an essay on ‘The Male Gays in Film.’ (It should have been ‘The Male Gaze in Film’)." u/SunburnedStickperson also commented, "And they never believe us when we say that we’ll catch them because they aren’t as clever as they think that they are."
At the end of the day, stories like this are also a reminder that artificial intelligence itself was never really the villain. AI can be useful when used responsibly, and many students genuinely rely on it to brainstorm ideas or improve their understanding of difficult topics. The real issue begins when laziness completely replaces effort. Because no matter how advanced technology becomes, it still cannot save someone who refuses to read their "own work" before submitting it.
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