I had an undergraduate class on the ethics of robots. A number of our assignments were to write blog posts that deal with this topic. We were permitted and even encouraged to write our posts in the form of short stories, fictional dialogues, etc. I was really excited about the prospect of being able to write some fiction in a philosophy class, since basically all of my written assignments up to that point had been standard argumentative essays. So, for my first assignment I wrote a short story about a fictional world in which a highly intelligent robot was built to help a civilization to live as ethically as possible. (I'm not going to go into the details, but I thought it was clearly relevant to the course.) Anyhow, I got the worst grade I'd ever gotten on an assignment in university: a C-. His explanation was that it wasn't clear enough how it was relevant to the course. In response, I wrote about 10 pages explaining the various relevant themes and motifs in the story with reference to Asimov and literature in ethics. Obviously, fiction does not make everything explicit. That's part of what is beautiful about fiction and poetry—the author's goal is not to spell it out word for word, but to evoke something in the reader. I basically argued that he should not have given us the option of writing fiction if what he wanted was a clear discussion of particular topic. You can't have both, in a sense. He refused to adjust my grade in the end.

My next assignment was a bit of revenge. I wrote it in the form of a news article with the headline "[Professor's name] charged with keeping robot sex slaves". The piece was relevant to the course, since it considers the possible ethical problems associated with developing sentient beings for our pleasure and whether such beings would not be deserving of the same rights and autonomy as humans. Since these assignments were blog posts, googling the professor's name gave my post as the top result. It was not until later in the day (after our lecture, in which many students enthusiastically discussed the "article") that he deleted the post. He filed a harassment complaint against me. I got a formal warning from the academic overlords. Nothing else happened. I ended up doing pretty well in the class.