The Sentence Suffered Sudden Cardiac Arrest

I sat in row D of Amphitheater 3 yesterday, ostensibly invigilating twenty-two undergraduates writing an essay on social stratification.

Around 10:14 a.m., the Wi-Fi blinked out for eight minutes.

It wasn't a riot. There were no gasps. Just a sudden, clinical stillness, followed by forty-four hands freezing an inch above their keyboards like spiders stunned by bug spray. A student named Kevin—I know his name because his desktop wallpaper is a giant rendering of Kimi—stared at an uncompleted clause: "Weber's conception of bureaucratic rationality implies that..."

His fingers hovered. He tapped the spacebar twice. Nothing auto-suggested. He glanced at the ceiling, then at his phone, then back at the blinking vertical bar.

"Sir?" he whispered, his voice oddly papery. "The box isn't finishing."

"Finish it yourself, Kevin," I murmured, watching my own hand automatically reach into my pocket to stroke my glowing phone screen for reassurance. (I had secretly queued a NotebookLM summary of the exam grading rubric twenty minutes earlier; I wasn't judging, I was craving.)

Kevin’s mouth opened slightly. He tried typing the letter t. Then backspaced it. His forearms were rigid. Without the predictive drip from the model supplying the next three adjectives, his thought had simply suffered cardiac arrest. It wasn’t that he lacked knowledge; his syntax engine had just been repossessed.

By 10:20 a.m., half the lecture hall was sweating. The campus network had returned, thank God. Instantly, eighty-eight paragraphs blossomed across the room: rhythmic, velvet-smooth, indistinguishable from the synthetic mulch filling school newsletters and town council meeting recaps. A sea of uniform AI slop washed over twenty-two screens, and twenty-two nervous systems exhaled in unison.

To break the reliance before your own prose turns into gelatin: pick one physical pen and write your opening argument on an index card before lifting your laptop lid. If your fingers twitch for an autocomplete spoon-feed, check out Time Well Spent to remember how an unassisted sentence breathes.

I handed Kevin an A-minus because his model used the word inexorable. I think it was an A-minus. The grading script gave it to him, and who am I to interrupt the circuit?