Colleges Have to Do Something About AI

Cheating is one thing. But this is something else.

Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

I cheated in college. Not like, a lot, but I’d estimate a fair few points of my very mediocre 3.2 GPA were thanks to quick Wikipedia refreshers during bathroom breaks in history exams. To me, that’s fine. Everyone cuts corners, and college students have a lot going on. Do I remember a lot of my history curriculum? Absolutely not, and that’s on me. But I read the texts. I wrote the essays, even if I forgot them weeks later. I skipped a lot of class because I was convinced that serving as a middling desk editor on the campus newspaper was the highest calling offered by God, but we got through it. I learned some stuff. It turned out ok.

Kids today, it seems, are not ok. This is the nut graf from a long New York magazine story that came out today on the rampant use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models colloquially known as “AI.”

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

The full story is an utterly harrowing read, if you care at all about higher education or have even the dimmest understanding of what it will mean for society when a generation of human beings outsource their entire ability to make conclusions to a faulty server farm in Arizona. But what struck and shocked me throughout is how utterly feckless the American system of higher education has been about this.

Per the piece: