Apropos to my post from last week on AI and Universities, here’s Yascha Mounk on the topic, noting the terrible incentives involved. If (1) AI is treated as cheating, which it should be in some coursework, and (2) AI’s ease-of-use dramatically increases cheating, as it has, then the normal mechanisms for dealing with cheating get completely swamped.
Others are well-aware of the problem but don’t really know what to do about it. When you suspect that an assignment was completed by AI, it’s very hard to prove that without a confrontation with a student that is certain to be deeply awkward, and may even inspire a formal complaint. And if somehow you do manage to prove that a student has cheated, a long and frustrating bureaucratic process awaits—at the end of which, college administrators may impose an extremely lenient punishment or instruct professors to turn a blind eye.
The entire article is worth reading; cheating is just one of a few topics in it.