Whenever i see people getting nostalgic for “old-fashioned” cheating on school assignments because at least it wasn’t LLM-generated, and their argument is “cheating used to require you to learn something,” I think they’re from another universe.

Cheating on school assignments, from what I know, has always had the potential to be either “somewhat learning-adjacent” or “entirely mindless.”

Before chat-whatever, yeah, sure, cheaters might manually copy their essays from somewhere (forcing them to engage with the material to a degree). But they also might copy-paste them from a shady website, or pay a classmate to write them (or coerce a classmate to write them with threats of being beaten up and shoved in a locker).

All of which would require the same amount of “actual engagement with the topic” as typing prompts into a generating program. Unless they looked through it afterwards to double-check stuff. Which, again, would be the same in either case.

As for standardized tests– yeah, some cheaters would painstakingly write the answers onto something they brought with them illicitly (and I’m sure they still do, when the test doesn’t allow them to bring a device capable of accessing LLMs). And yeah that does require some studying.

But, they also would do things like copy from the kid in front of them. Which could consist entirely of “looking at which circles on the answer sheet were getting penciled in,” and no actual “reading the questions.” Involving less engagement with the material than typing prompts. (And that’s assuming they even went to the test in the first place, and didn’t get a classmate to take it for them.)

The problem isn’t a specific technology. That specific technology has plenty of inherent problems, but that is not one of them.

It’s the fact that cheating on school assignments has been extremely common in many forms for a very long time– and that people who consider cheating normal are now in a whole lot of positions of power– and so they jump at the chance to push the idea that this new form of cheating is okay.

Which isn’t an attractive truth, because it doesn’t present any solutions (since “gaining enough power to kick cheaters out of power” could probably only be achieved by being a cheater, and then it’s anyone’s guess whether the decisions you make with that power will be any better than before.)

But then… gotta remember that “force the cheaters in power to outlaw LLMs” also doesn’t present a solution, for pretty much the same reasons.