There’s a certain irony that one of the steadiest concerns about AI has been that it is taking the entry-level jobs fresh college graduates depend on, while one of the first fully automated roles has turned out to be student.
The New York Times reports that AI agents are now completing all aspects of online college courses: watching lectures, taking tests, writing papers, even discussing the reading with classmates. They found that “none of the three leading A.I. tools among students — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grammarly” (not Claude?) refused to write papers for students, and the AI companies haven’t prevented their agents from logging into student learning platforms like Canvas and Blackboard.
AI company Perplexity said in a statement that locking agents out of those sites or forcing them to identify themselves “would put the student’s privacy and security at risk.”
I think it’s too late to head off this particular problem by regulating the AI companies. Being an ‘A’ student is now well within the capabilities of open-weights models already in the wild.
All the cheating is, of course, making it even harder for graduates to compete with AIs for work, as employers question whether a degree means anything. Long-term, this is bad for the institutions awarding those degrees, but in the short term the Times says they are loath to crack down on paying customers, given the difficulty of proving misconduct.
Classes with an in-person requirement can force students to show up and demonstrate mastery without their devices. But I think the days of online classes might be numbered. At the very least, I won’t be shocked if colleges start putting an asterisk on online transcript credits in an effort to preserve what’s left of their brands.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.