This bot will do your homework for $9.95 a month. Does it actually work?
According to one 10th-grade history teacher, it’s unlikely to get you an A.
“EssayBot is the highly acclaimed online platform giving essay writing assistance to students and subject authors. As the program has been produced with the most sophisticated tools and technologies, it is extremely automated and individualized. This US-based corporation works with the only purpose to give honest and convincing aid to authors for creating superior volumes that will get rewards and praises.”
That’s what EssayBot says when I asked it to describe itself. The service aims to be the holy grail for the world’s burnout 11th-graders. Type in your prompt — any prompt, from your history assignment to the question “what is EssayBot?” — and the machines get to work.
Your opening paragraph is pulled whole cloth from a database of scholastic material. Then the diction is gently rephrased, with synonyms swapped in for non-essential words, until it can fly under the radar of the average plagiarism detector. From there, you can import a laundry list of additional paragraphs related to the subject of your essay, or you can use a drop-down menu called a “sentence creator,” perched patiently next to your blinking cursor. Write a word and EssayBot does its best to think up a sensible follow-up clause, based on the contours and language of what you’ve already got written down. All this for only $9.95 a month, or $49.95 a year. If you’ve ever spent a sleepless school night staring at an empty Word doc, you know what it’s like to be desperate enough to pay up.
I discovered EssayBot via YouTube ad, and when I put the site’s name into Google, I found hundreds of cautiously hopeful students taking to forums and review sites over the past year, asking if EssayBot is too good to be true. Procrastinating teens are an underserved market.
Aaron Yin, the proprietor of EssayBot, has been trying to sell AI text generation for years with limited success. His first attempt came in 2017 with a service that automatically constructed résumés, and the tech infrastructure of EssayBot was initially intended to help small businesses generate branding copy. But that angle never took off. Instead, Yin needed to find a hungrier demographic, and the millions of young men and women on a humanities deadline CONTINUE READING: EssayBot will do your homework. But it won’t get you an A. - Vox
