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Welcome to the Bogosity Podcast for the week of March 15 2026,
the podcast that wakes you up before you go-go.
This is your host, Shane Killian. Let's stylize the News of the Bogus.
This is one from the annals of unintended consequences:
Trying to detect and punish students for using AI is pushing them towards using AI!
The main reason is that these AI detectors really don't work.
As we covered in the past, despite claims of being over 95% accurate,
independent analyses have shown they're little better than flipping a coin.
As someone who has a daughter who was falsely accused of this in school,
I can tell you the grief, distress, and anxiety it can cause a young person
who's put a ton of work into her creative writing.
What's causing a problem is that AIs are trained on quality human writing and tuned to write well.
Why is that a problem? Because students who write well are much more likely to get flagged as having used AI!
False positives can happen when using higher-end phrases such as "devoid of" or "lacking" instead of just "without."
And don't even get me started on the em dash—which is something every student should learn how to use!
And yet, they're now considered to be a huge indication that something is written by an AI.
Why? Because the best writers and editors use the em dash, so the AIs do, too!
You can have my em dashes when you pry them from my cold dead fingers!
And if you're using space-hyphen-space instead, you're a bad person and you should feel bad!
All right, typographic punctiliousness aside,
it's bad that students are now being encouraged to dumb down their writing lest they face a false accusation of using AI.
Dadland Maye wrote about just this in an excellent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education,
and it's even worse than what I've said.
Because this anti-AI backlash is actually encouraging students who have never used AI before to start using it!
Quote: "This fall, a student told me she began using generative AI
only after learning that stylistic features such as em dashes were rumored to trigger AI detectors.
To protect herself from being flagged, she started running her writing through AI tools to see how it would register."
Yes, she was using it defensively, to try and avoid a false accusation of cheating!
Quote: "In 2023, researchers at Stanford University
warned that detection tools were biased against nonnative English writers.
Their study, published in Patterns, found that detectors misclassified more than half of
essays written by nonnative speakers as AI-generated, while nearly all essays by native speakers passed.
The authors anticipated that such bias could encourage defensive or evasive behavior.
Two years later, that prediction is taking shape in my writing classrooms,
extending even to native English speakers whose polished prose has begun to feel suspect."
So, foreigners are more likely to be flagged because their grammar and vocabulary is superior to native speakers.
George Bernard Shaw would find that hilarious; the students who were actually accused? Not so much.
This actually represses their writing skills. Quote:
"Students learn that style can count against them, and that fluency invites suspicion.
In that environment, AI becomes a way to smooth uncertainty.
It offers reassurance that language will appear ordinary enough to pass.
This is a subtle shift with real consequences.
Writing begins to function as a source of risk rather than evidence of learning.
Students adapt accordingly. They seek tools that reduce exposure and normalize tone.
Over time, detection begins shaping student behavior in ways that resemble instruction,
even when no explicit guidance is given."
And the ultimate result from all of this is that everyone's writing
will be just as dull and ordinary as the lowest common denominator.
This is the big problem when you have teachers who want a shiny thing to do their jobs for them
instead of actually teaching students.
Maye wrote about students who had been praised for years for their writing skills who are now made to feel like cheaters,
because the AI detection tools think that quality writing means AI.
And the result is that many students end up subscribing to multiple AI services
to learn how the detection systems work—not because they want to cheat, but because they need to defend themselves
from fraudulent tools by unscrupulous companies implemented by lazy teachers.
This has always been the fundamental problem with the way schools police cheating.
To try and stop the cheaters, they look for shortcuts.
Personal story: I was taking an exam and just looked around the lecture hall as I thought about what to write.
That's just how I've always needed to do it.
When I look at the page the whole time, I get tunnel vision and everything goes purple.
But I absolutely was not looking at any of the other students' papers,
not even looking in a direction that I could be mistaken for doing so—
on purpose, to avoid a false accusation of cheating.
And then the professor came up to me and angrily told me
to keep my eyes on my own paper or I'd fail the course.
I promptly dropped the course and issued a complaint against the professor.
Nothing happened, of course.
Because sadly, this sort of shortcutting has been typical of how professors operate—
which is ironic, because if you think about it,
that's exactly the sort of shortcut they call "cheating" when done by a student!
And it wouldn't be so bad if there were any sort of consistency or predictability.
But like always, there's no continuity between policies in different classrooms—
and the usual failure of professors to understand just how much students work.
Quote: "Many students work 20 to 40 hours a week.
Many are multilingual. They encounter a different AI policy in nearly every course.
When one professor bans AI entirely and another encourages its use,
students learn to stay quiet rather than risk a misstep.
The burden of inconsistency falls on them, and it takes a concrete form: time, revision, and self-surveillance.
One student described spending hours rephrasing sentences that detectors flagged as AI-generated
even though every word was original. 'I revise and revise,' the student said. 'It takes too much time.'"
If you're a teacher or professor, consider doing what Maye did, quote:
"I stopped requiring students to disclose their AI use.
My syllabi had asked for transparency, yet the expectation had become incoherent.
The boundary between using AI and navigating the internet had blurred beyond recognition.
Asking students to document every encounter with the technology
would have turned writing into an accounting exercise.
I shifted my approach. I told students they could use AI for research and outlining,
while drafting had to remain their own.
I taught them how to prompt responsibly and how to recognize when a tool began replacing their thinking."
In other words, what teachers should have been doing all along.
And the results? Quote:
"The atmosphere in my classroom changed.
Students approached me after class to ask how to use these tools well.
One wanted to know how to prompt for research without copying output.
Another asked how to tell when a summary drifted too far from its source.
These conversations were pedagogical in nature.
They became possible only after AI use stopped functioning as a disclosure problem
and began functioning as a subject of instruction."
Amazing how that happens when your attitude to cheating stops being "guilty until proven innocent."
Education is not about policing. It never should have been.
Teach students how to write and think critically,
teach them when tools are helpful and when they become a crutch,
and above all, for the love of all that is rational, stop using shiny things to do your job for you!
Presenting: the greatest game this side of Yuggoth!
You are H.P. Lovecraft's cat, and your name is Ni***
...Right. We can't say that on a podcast.
Anyway, that's the point: Your name is a joke.
So now, you are out for revenge. You become...the NecronomiCat!
Using the Necronomicon, you come to the present day to buy a gat.
That's a gun. For a cat.
It's a phat cat gat.
But the Necronomicon is treacherous, and it let in Lovecraft's monsters.
Now, in a crumbling world, you must fight!
Build your team, buy guns and armor,
buy items of dubious legality, defeat the bosses of each level.
Then take Lovecraft down!
Play NecronomiCat! The link is at cat.bogosity.tv.
Yeah, we're doing cat.bogosity.tv, not...that other one.
What, you want me to get kicked off the Internet or something?
I know, that was a long segment, and so is this one, so be prepared.
This is why there are only two News of the Bogus stories this week instead of the usual three.
But it's worth taking the time to go over it.
Because we're at another point where we're going to learn if our every move will be surveilled by government,
absent any sort of warrant or probable cause.
Senator Ron Wyden went off about the bipartisan support for Trump's nominee Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA,
just ahead of the deadline to reauthorize Section 702.
WYDEN: During his hearing, General Rudd failed to demonstrate a bare minimum understanding
of the constitutional limits on NSA activities.
His responses to questions about privacy rights and transparency were deeply troubling.
KILLIAN: Of course, ask any member of Congress about the Constitution and they'll fail just as badly.
WYDEN: Yet the President keeps nominating officials to key cybersecurity roles
who have less knowledge of the topic than an undergraduate computer science major.
KILLIAN: Long-time listeners know that that's sadly very typical of nominees from either party.
Wyden, a sitting member of the Intelligence Committee,
is once again sounding the alarm bells about Section 702.
He's tried to oppose the reauthorization every time it's come up,
but Democrat or Republican, the president always got his way.
WYDEN: These three issues will be before Senators very shortly.
They are Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, surveillance of Americans by ICE,
and the dangerous ways that artificial intelligence can be used to surveil American citizens.
KILLIAN: Since he has access to classified materials, he can't tell us everything he knows.
He was very coy about what the NSA was doing,
warning that the government was secretly interpreting the PATRIOT Act in ways Congress never intended.
Nobody believed it could be as bad as he was saying—until Edward Snowden revealed it all.
But despite the revelations, the pattern keeps repeating itself.
WYDEN: Opponents of reforming Section 702 don't want a real debate
where members can decide for themselves which reform amendments to support.
So what happens is, there's an inadequate bill that's brought up,
magically shows up a few days before the authorization expires, and members are told,
"Holy Toledo! There's just no time to do anything except pass that bill."
KILLIAN: Yes, it's the old "we have to pass it to find out what's in it!" tactic.
It wasn't just Obamacare, people. They pull that crap all the time.
Yet another example of why we need the Read the Bills Act!
Rand Paul proposes it every term. Congress wants nothing to do with it.
As for Section 702:
WYDEN: It authorizes a warrantless surveillance program.
The FISA Court approves the overall program, but it doesn't review the individual targets.
In many cases, these will be law-abiding Americans having perfectly legitimate conversations.
We don't know exactly how many Americans' communications are swept up
by what the government calls "incidental collection."
That's because the government refuses to tell us.
But we know it's large. We know it's increasing.
The best way to protect the rights of Americans is to ensure the government can't conduct searches
for Americans' private conversations in all that 702 data without a warrant.
KILLIAN: We always get the copsuckers whining about things like this,
that cops won't be able to get what they need to catch the bad guys.
But they always have the proper constitutional procedure available to them: get a warrant! It's not hard!
If anything, complaints around the country, federal and state,
are about how easily and dismissively judges hand out warrants.
WYDEN: For years, there's been jaw-dropping abuse of these searches. And that's been done especially by the FBI.
And I especially want to point to a new provision of 702 that urgently needs to be repealed.
Two years ago, during the last reauthorization debacle, something really bad happened.
Over in the House, existing surveillance law was changed
so that the government could force anybody with access to communications
to secretly collect those communications for the government.
As I pointed out at the time, that could mean anybody installing or repairing a cable box,
anybody who was responsible for a Wi-Fi router.
It was a jaw-dropping expansion of authorities that could end up forcing countless ordinary Americans
to secretly help the government spy on their fellow citizens.
This was such a dramatic and disturbing expansion of Section 702
that the Biden Justice Department had to promise it would only use these authorities in certain narrow situations.
The Biden administration refused to tell the public when it would use this dangerous, incredibly broad provision.
The Trump administration certainly isn't providing any details about it.
So Congress isn't having a real informed debate about this staggering provision
and whether this vast and dangerous expansion of surveillance is justified.
KILLIAN: You'd think that if anyone,
the Republican members of Congress who were illegally surveilled by Biden's NSA,
particularly leading up to the election, would be the first to call for at least a debate!
WYDEN: The past 15 years have shown that unless the Congress has an open debate about surveillance,
the laws that are passed cannot be assumed to have the support of the American people.
That's fundamentally wrong.
And right now the government is relying on secret law with regard to Section 702 of FISA.
Americans have the right to be confused and angry that this is how the government and Congress choose to do business.
Now there's another example of secret law related to Section 702
and it affects the privacy rights of the American people.
For years I've asked various administrations to declassify it. Thus far they've all refused.
I strongly believe this matter should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly
before 702 is reauthorized.
The fact is, when it's eventually declassified, the American people are going to be stunned
that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.
KILLIAN: In reality, this has just gotten worse under Trump II with ICE and CBP terrorizing neighborhoods
and arresting even American citizens without warrant or probable cause.
WYDEN: For example, our bipartisan reform bill takes on an issue I've been working on for years.
It's the government's purchase of private information on the American people
from one of the sleaziest industries in America, which is the one run by the data brokers.
Both ICE and CBP have purchased and used Americans' location data,
highly sensitive information that can reveal what medical clinics you go to,
what protests you're involved with, and the friends and family you see.
The agencies have made various arguments to justify collecting these records,
including the false assertion that all Americans actually consented to location data being collected.
I want to emphasize that the government in these cases bought records of millions of Americans' movements
without any warrant or court oversight whatsoever.
KILLIAN: And that can even go so far as to surveil everything you're doing with your phone at any given time,
which nowadays is where people put their most private information, their medical data,
their personal conversations, their mental health issues, their private thoughts and concerns.
WYDEN: It's almost equivalent to spying on your thoughts.
That's what happens when the government gets together with these sleazy data brokers.
KILLIAN: Wyden mentions the story we talked about last week,
with Anthropic refusing to do business with the DoJ and the Pentagon
unless there were safeguards against domestic spying.
WYDEN: As my colleagues are aware, the Trump administration decided to single out one company
over the weekend for punishment because the company didn't want its artificial intelligence
tool used for mass surveillance of Americans.
The company's CEO said that if the government's purchase of Americans' location,
web browsing, and other sensitive data is currently legal,
it's only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI.
KILLIAN: As we covered, OpenAI was happy to step in with safeguards
that were couched in such precatory wording that they can be easily sidestepped.
WYDEN: We're considering a nominee to be the director of the NSA
who refused to answer whether the government needs a warrant to spy on people in the United States.
He would not commit to maintaining the NSA's policy of not purchasing location data without a warrant.
He wouldn't commit to telling the American people if the NSA violates the policies and guardrails
of successive administrations that was made public.
This nominee wouldn't even promise to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee about these matters.
KILLIAN: One thing is certain: however much government is violating the Constitution,
it's always to a greater amount than appears to us from the outside.
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And now it's time to transparentize this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
The story so far: The Trump Administration levied a bunch of tariffs. A lot of people were worried they couldn't do that.
So they promised us that if the tariffs turn out to be illegal, they'll refund the money.
Actually, I say promised...browbeat by the court into agreeing to it is more like it.
In a filing to the United States Court of International Trade,
responding to a motion for preliminary injunction to stop the tariffs from being collected, they wrote:
"Defendants do not intend to oppose the Court's authority to order reliquidation of entries of merchandise
subject to the challenged tariffs if the tariffs are found in a
final and unappealable decision to have been unlawfully collected.
Such reliquidation would result in a refund of all duties determined to be unlawfully assessed, with interest."
They lost, so they appealed and filed for a stay. In that filing, they wrote:
"For any plaintiff who is an importer, even if a stay is entered and defendants do not prevail on appeal,
plaintiffs will assuredly receive payment on their refund with interest.
There is virtually no risk to any importer that they would not be made whole should they prevail on appeal.
The most harm that could incur would be a delay in collecting on deposits.
This harm is, by definition, not irreparable."
They said the same thing in multiple other cases.
The courts found that this comprises a legal estoppel,
binding them from arguing against the refunds in the future if the tariffs were found to be illegal.
And in all of those cases, the DoJ assured the courts that refunding the tariffs would be no problem.
Then, the Supreme Court found 6-3 that the tariffs were, in fact, illegal.
That left the government with all those tariffs to refund, and apparently, they can't do it.
Brandon Lord, Executive Director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Trade Policy and Programs,
said in a court filing, quote:
"CBP is not able to comply with the Court of International Trade's order of March 4, 2026,
that, with respect to any and all unliquidated entries that were entered subject to the IEEPA duties,
U.S. Customs and Border Protection must liquidate those entries without regard to the IEEPA duties.
As of March 4, 2026, the total amount of IEEPA duties and estimated duty deposits
collected pursuant to IEEPA is approximately $166 billion.
Approximately 20.1 million entries remain unliquidated as of March 4, 2026."
And that's just too much for it, quote:
"In light of the Court's March 5, 2026 amended order, CBP is now facing an unprecedented volume of refunds.
Its existing administrative procedures and technology are not well suited to a task of this scale
and will require manual work
that will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency's trade enforcement mission.
Personnel would be redirected from responsibilities
that serve to mitigate imminent threats to national security and economic security."
He includes a ton of details, enough to give you the idea of just how much of a Gordian knot this is.
And they're not gonna be able to simply cut through it.
They did assure the court, quote:
"CBP is making all possible efforts to have this new ACE functionality ready for use in 45days.
This new process will require minimal submission from importers."
But the question is, why are they only doing this now?
It wasn't at all a surprise that SCOTUS shot it down,
and they knew that there was at least a good chance they'd have to do all of these refunds.
And they didn't even try to get a jump on it?
Really, they should have been starting the process as soon as they assured everyone that refunds would be no problem.
That was how they narrowly avoided those injunctions, so you'd think they'd be prepared for this eventuality.
But obviously, thinking ahead isn't the Trump Administration's strong suit.
And all the while, interest was accruing.
Not only were the tariffs not a benefit for the taxpayers,
they ended up costing a lot more than they gained!
So all of that makes The Trump Administration this week's Biggest Bogon Emitter.
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And now let's intercommunicationalizationify this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
And it's a fourth one for Senator Josh Hawley, who wants to stop kids from using AI.
The GUARD Act is one of those infamous backronyms;
it stands for the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025.
Combine the privacy-hating age verification with anti-AI neo-Luddism,
because we have to protect the children from the world they will grow up in.
The bill would prohibit minors from accessing, quote:
"any interactive computer service or software application that produces new expressive content
or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator of the service or application;
and accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input
and produces adaptive or context-responsive output."
In other words, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Character.ai, etc.
Hey, Hawley, how are you going to prevent them from downloading ollama.exe and running them locally?
Similar bills have been introduced in Virginia, Oklahoma, and California.
As Andy Jung, Associate Counsel for TechFreedom, points out,
this is instantly going to be shut down by any sensible court as a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court has previously said that, quote:
"minors are entitled to a significant measure of First Amendment protection,
and only in relatively narrow and well-defined circumstances
may government bar public dissemination of protected materials to them."
And according to this very bill, this is about chatbots that, quote: "produce new expressive content."
So it is expressive content, and therefore comprises protected expression,
which applies not just to the written and spoken word, but to pictures, music, computer code, and video games.
The excuse is that, quote:
"These chatbots can generate and disseminate harmful or sexually explicit content to children."
I swear, these psychos are so obsessed with children and sexuality,
maybe they're the ones that should be banned!
One criterion the courts use is whether it regulates content-neutral speech or is content-based.
If it's content-based, you're under strict scrutiny, baby.
Again, according to the bill itself, it's "new expressive content" and it even so much as, quote:
"poses a risk of soliciting, encouraging, or inducing minors to engage in,
describe, or simulate sexually explicit conduct;
or create or transmit any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct."
So we need look no further than the text of the bill itself to see that it's content-based! It says so directly!
Strict scrutiny is the highest judicial standard,
and says that the law must be narrowly tailored to serve a crucial and necessary purpose,
and that there must be no less restrictive option available.
Jung wrote: "In fact, AI companies already have policies and features to protect minor users.
Because these bills aren't narrowly tailored, a court would strike them down for violating the First Amendment.
Banning minors from using chatbots is also bad policy.
Last October, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the state's proposed ban, stating,
'AI is already shaping the world, and it is imperative that adolescents learn how to safely interact with AI systems.
We cannot prepare our youth for a future where AI is ubiquitous
by preventing their use of these tools altogether.'
Most U.S. teens use AI chatbots.
These young users have a First Amendment right to receive the information the AIs output,
which is generally protected speech.
Prohibiting access to chatbots would violate minors' constitutional rights
and deprive them of the vast benefits of AI."
The Constitution says that minors have rights,
and you don't get to turn them into non-entities solely for the sake of your own self-aggrandizement.
So all of that makes Josh Hawley this week's Idiot Extraordinaire.
Well, that wraps up this "See a broad wid dat booty at'em,
leg 'er down a smack-em yak-em" edition of the Bogosity Podcast.
I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please go to donate.bogosity.tv for several ways to support,
and discord.bogosity.tv to join the discussion.
Subscribe at the Discord, Patreon, or SubscribeStar and you can listen early and ad-free.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, here's a quote from Benjamin Spock:
"The more children learn about sexuality from talking with their parents and teachers and reading accurate books,
the less they feel compelled to find out for themselves."
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