Bloomberg Opinion
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For many college students these days, life is a breeze. Assignments that once demanded days of diligent research can be accomplished in minutes. Polished essays are available, on demand, for any topic under the sun. No need to trudge through Dickens or Demosthenes; all the relevant material can be instantly summarized after a single chatbot prompt.

Welcome to academia in the age of artificial intelligence. As several recent reports have shown, outsourcing one’s homework to AI has become routine. Perversely, students who still put in the hard work often look worse by comparison with their peers who don’t. Professors find it nearly impossible to distinguish computer-generated copy from the real thing — and, even weirder, have started using AI themselves to evaluate their students’ work.

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It’s an untenable situation: computers grading papers written by computers, students and professors idly observing, and parents paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege. At a time when academia is under assault from many angles, this looks like a crisis in the making.

Incorporating AI into college curricula surely makes sense in many respects. Some evidence suggests it may improve engagement. Already it’s reshaping job descriptions across industries, and employers will increasingly expect graduates to be reasonably adept at using it. By and large this will be a good thing as productivity improves and innovation accelerates.

But much of the learning done in college isn’t vocational. Humanities, in particular, have a higher calling: to encourage critical thinking, form habits of mind, broaden intellectual horizons — to acquaint students with “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. Mastering Aristotle or Aquinas or Adam Smith requires more than a sentence-long prompt, and is far more rewarding.

For schools, the first step must be to get serious. Too many have hazy or ambiguous policies on AI; many seem to be hoping the problem will go away. They must clearly articulate when enlisting such tools is acceptable — ideally, under a professor’s guidance and with a clear pedagogical purpose — and what the consequences will be for misuse. There’s plenty of precedent: Honor codes, for instance, have been shown to reduce cheating, in particular when schools take them seriously, students know precisely what conduct is impermissible and violations are duly punished.

College kids have always cheated and always will. The point is to make it harder, impose consequences and — crucially — start shaping norms on campus for a new and very strange era. The future of the university may well depend on it.

— Bloomberg Opinion