When West—not his real name—enrolled in college last year at the University of Rhode Island, he quickly realized that his professors expected a lot out of him. He had scheduled teaching, he had assignments, he had tests—and he didn’t want to devote an equal amount of time to all of them.

“I would like to say I’m pretty smart,” West said. So he turned to a homework-completion trick he’d started using the year before in high school. He logged into GPT-3, a text-generating tool developed by OpenAI, which can create written content from simple prompts. Trained on a vast corpus of preexisting language drawn from Wikipedia, Common Crawl, and other sources, GPT-3 is intended as a tool for automating writing tasks. But it’s also increasingly helping students like West avoid some of the tedium of academic writing and skip right to the fun part (being done).

“I was like, ‘Holy shit,’ you know, like, it was insane,” he said. “When people are children, they imagine that a machine can do their homework. And I just happened to stumble upon that machine.”