The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.
Really, A.I. only threatens one specific mode of schoolwork: writing papers. There’s so many other ways to show you’ve learned the material. Of course writing itself is a critical for everyone to learn, but maybe you have to limit it to in-person short essays during class time.