How Educators Can Defeat AI

James Walsh’s viral recent New York article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” was not notable because it revealed the extent to which AI has taken over education; that much was already obvious to anyone who has been around a school or college lately. Rather, what Walsh’s reporting brought to light was the degree to which college-age students have developed an internally coherent theory of why they have the right to use AI. It isn’t just that everyone is getting AI to do their homework for them, but the blithe indifference with which everyone is cheating. Gens Z and Alpha lack the cultural immune system that provokes a resistance to AI among older cohorts. ChatGPT is finishing the job that iPhones started, raising a cohort defined not only by illiteracy but by hostility to literacy.