Are We Human, Or Are We Chancer?

November 27, 2025 by NevilleMorley

It’s weird that I haven’t seen any discussion of this, as it seems improbable that the robots would choose the University of Exeter’s Classics Department as the bridgehead for world conquest, but there seems to be a sudden plague of artificial MA applicants. An email arrives from someone with a Nigerian name, setting out a possible project for a Masters by Research that does indeed tie in quite nicely with one’s research interests, asking for advice on whether this would be workable and whether I’d be willing to act as supervisor; yes, the proposal is much too large and somewhat vague, but it’s very clearly presented. It’s only when subsequent messages, in response to a few polite suggestions, tend to miss the point completely (“you need to narrow the focus”; “here are the three different, equally vast, sub-divisions of the entire topic”), while still being perfectly grammatical and entirely without any trace of individual personality, that one starts to become suspicious. And then more arrive, and colleagues turn out to be receiving them as well…

Our PG Recruitment office is still trying to get on top of the situation – their initial advice was to respond to people who send the same boilerplate proposal to multiple colleagues off with a flea in their ear but carry on trying to engage with people who might, just conceivably, turn out to be genuine pots of income, sorry, genuine applicants. This doesn’t deal with the fact that the emails are now precisely tailored to individual academics, undoubtedly on the basis of digesting our profiles on the university webpage. They are much too obsequious, with no sign of wanting to study what they want to study – but that’s not a 100% tell, as students can also lack confidence.

I am starting to feel extremely sorry for any real Nigerian students who really wish to study ancient economic history or the reception of Thucydides in political theory with me and have spent hours finely honing their proposal and getting the language perfect, because this now will come across as incredibly suspicious.

The real question is what on earth these GenAI-powered fake applicants are getting out of an exchange of emails about the best way to frame a project on Roman demography. Are we training the AI to refine its command of writing research proposals, so that it can in due course replace us? Are they trying to distract us from a discovery that will somehow thwart their plans – the answer lay in ancient history all along? Do they just want to waste our time, and if so why – pure trolling? If they were hoping to steal our personal details, they should simply have dangled the prospect of a bit of research funding – forget the classic Nigerian prince scam, a couple of hundred quid would have most humanities academics eating out of their hands…