An article from New York Magazine has been making the rounds this week. It touches on several aspects of the problem of student use of ChatGPT and other AIs in their coursework, including its prevalence, the underestimation of the phenomenon by faculty, the growing acceptance of its use (see Cluely), and the possible consequences of all of this. For some, it will be an eye-opener. If you’ve been reading the posts here about AI over the past five years I don’t think you’ll be too surprised. That said, there are some noteworthy passages. Here’s one that illustrates what students are doing with AI and how they don’t quite understand what it is they’re doing—including what they’re doing to themselves. Wendy, a freshman finance major at one of the city’s top universities, told me that she is against using AI. Or, she clarified, “I’m against copy-and-pasting. I’m against cheating and plagiarism. All of that. It’s against the student handbook.” Then she described, step-by-step, how on a recent Friday at 8 a.m., she called up an AI platform to help her write a four-to-five-page essay due two hours later. Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.” Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a..