The Accidental Plagiarism Panic

I used an AI tool to help structure the outline of my final term paper, but I wrote all the actual content myself. The night before submission, I ran it through a plagiarism checker just to be safe, and it flagged 40% of my own original thoughts as 'AI-generated.' I spent the next six hours intentionally dumbing down my vocabulary, adding grammatical quirks, and making my writing actively worse just so I wouldn't get accused of academic dishonesty by a faulty algorithm.