Les Perelman, a now retired former director of writing for MIT, has long been against the idea of using machines to grade essays. "I'm a skeptic," he told the New York Times in 2012 — and now he's built his own machine to prove his skepticism right.

Called the Babel Generator — short for Basic Automatic BS Essay Language Generator — the software is able to produce complete essays in less than a second, and all you have to do is feed it up to three keywords. The essays are grammatically correct but nonsensical. The goal isn't to produce great writing, though, it's to fool other machines: Babel was designed specifically to prove that essay-grading software doesn't effectively analyze things like meaning and isn't able to check facts. Perelman's gibberish essays have managed to get high scores on automated tests like MY Access!, with grades like 5.4 out of 6.

Various studies have shown that automated software often scores papers roughly the same as its human counterparts, and the software is gaining popularity at schools simply because it can grade papers so much faster than teachers. Previously, Perelman had managed to fool these algorithms with essays that employed a few simple tricks, using lengthy words and sentences, as well as connective words like "however." Some developers — including a team at MIT, building software called EASE (Enhanced AI Scoring Engine) — are even trying to create automated systems that are more human by mimicking how actual professors grade.

For Perelman, he believes that these kinds of systems can work in tandem with real human professors — but they aren't a substitute. "I am not an absolutist," he told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "I want to be clear about that."