Researchers at Rutgers University have identified what appears to be the only college term paper written in the United States in Spring 2025 that did not receive assistance from Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The 17-page paper, entitled “Foods I Like,” was submitted to a Senior Honors Seminar in the Nutrition Department at Clemson University.
The author, Peyton DeBrine, said that writing the paper was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and that includes telling my girlfriend last semester that I had contracted herpes from her best friend. With this paper, I had to think of all the things I’ve eaten in my life, and then I had to decide what things I liked the most. I’m almost 21 years old, so I’ve eaten a lot of stuff.
“The other kids in the class cheated. They used ChatGPT to find out what the most popular foods in South Carolina were, and then they said that those things were their favorites. I was the only student who didn’t write about boiled peanuts, shrimp and grits, or fried pork rinds.”
Mr. DeBrine’s claim of originality was verified when the Rutgers research team reverse-engineered the text of his term paper. “Every sentence he wrote could be traced back to one or more neurons firing in his brain,” confirmed team leader Natalie Cluckson, a neuroscientist. “All paths ended there, with no external AI stimulation involved. This young man is telling the truth about the origins of the document we examined. Although the quality of the paper is not high — he consistently misspells ‘Funyuns’ and ‘Pringles’, for example — that’s not the key issue here. What’s important is that Mr. DeBrine has achieved mediocrity on his own. He should feel good about what he’s accomplished.”