AI Is an Existential Threat to Colleges. Can They Adapt? - Commentary

At dinner recently, I idly asked a junior at a top magnet school how many of his classmates use artificial intelligence to cheat. I was expecting the number to be high, but even so, I was shocked: He guessed it was about 60 percent. A subsequent poll of college professors and high school teachers I conducted on X generated similar results: Most thought at least 40 percent of their students were submitting at least some work from AI chatbots. Those numbers are necessarily unscientific. We’ve never had an accurate count of the number of cheaters, because if cheating were reliably detectable, students wouldn’t bother. AI cheating is even harder to detect, because each essay is unique, rendering tools such as essay databases useless.