prof didn’t mark my essay properly because she thought it was ai-generated… but it was just very bad. is this a common occurrence now?

hello, i’m a first-year student. a month or two ago, my prof set a formative essay assignment to provide early feedback before the actual summative essay was due. this was my first time writing a uni essay and i had no idea what i was doing, but i did my best.

a few weeks later, i get the feedback, and the only two things on it are a comment about a badly done citation and a reminder saying ‘on the real thing, remember to include the coversheet with the box to confirm that you haven’t used ai’. the email letting us know the feeback was out mentioned ai too. ai has been talked about occasionally in my course so i assumed that it was just a tiny reminder since i hadn’t included it in the formative (i assumed i didn’t need to since it was formative).

obviously i was a bit annoyed at this. i was expecting some kind of feedback about my writing style, structure, etc. and the only thing she mentioned was the citation and the coversheet? wtf??

so i go to her next drop-in session, and i ask if she could give me more feedback on this. she pulls up my essay and says, “oh yeah, i remember this one. i didn’t mark it because you used ai to generate it.”

huh??? i tell her that i didn’t use ai, and it was all my work. she tells me she believes me, and does give me some actual thorough feedback (on what i now realise is a very dogshit essay) and suggests that i get some help/take a class for writing essays.

in the end, it didn’t end up being a big deal, but i feel like i embarrassed myself quite a bit. has this happened to anyone else? my takeaway is that if ai didn’t exist, she would have assumed it was just a dogshit essay and given actual criticism, instead of just writing it off as not done by me. is this becoming more common, or is this me being stupid?