i agree that this is depressing, but i don't think AI is the _cause_. this problem started when we collectively decided to gatekeep social and physical mobility with higher education
i went to university ~15 years ago. a naive idiot, i thought that i'm there to learn. eventually one of my parents casually admitted that university is for getting connections--i think the parent who was doing a PhD at the time, too
a year or two after that i discovered that you need a diploma to be considered human for the purposes of immigration. after that point, higher education ceased to have any meaning besides "a ticket to survival". having to study was an unpleasant byproduct
at the time, AI didn't exist and i also didn't know how to cheat. would i cheat my way through today? without hesitation, yes. academic integrity means nothing when the other end of scale is "being treated by a bureaucracy like you matter".
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