The AI Cheating Epidemic - First Things

Last spring, some of my graduating seniors felt obligated to take me aside before graduation, as if I were a naive child, and pronounce a dark truth in the era of widely available AI technology: You teachers can’t win. We will find a way to take the easy path. Every time.  

At the graduation ceremony (which I did not attend), other students approached a colleague of mine, not in a spirit of guidance but of arrogance: We cheated the whole year, and you never caught us. They had escaped the noose of accountability. They weren’t relieved. Instead, they reveled, seeming to relish being scholastic frauds.      

We are in the era of pervasive, brazen student cheating. “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” proclaims New York Magazine. High school and college teachers must now revert to old-school methods of assigning work. The ballast of media panic has been about how cheating will diminish students’ capacity to labor, to produce. They won’t acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to be good doctors or lawyers or therapists. GDP might crash.

But the AI cheating crisis, at its heart, concerns something more profound. Journalists should be asking teachers a different question about student cheating. Not “Do they do it?” or “Is it becoming more widespread?” But: “Do your students feel bad about turning in work that is not their own? Do they feel any shame?”

Increasingly, alarmingly, the answer is simply no. When they get caught red-handed, they don’t blush. They certainly don’t apologize or offer any authentic excuses. There is no sense that what they are doing is immoral. At best it’s amoral. Their reaction to getting caught is best described as annoyance, the reaction one might have for being singled out and ticketed among a jaywalking mob.

This is the more insidious harm embedded in the modus operandi of the American student. When a corrosive habit becomes so widespread that it feels normal, the few who resist are left not only disadvantaged, but resentful—punished, ironically, for their integrity. The temptation proves too strong. And who can blame them? Teenagers have always cheated. But it was never everyone, and never with the most powerful intelligence tool humanity has ever known. Moral drift, normative desensitization—call it what you will—is now unfolding in our schools at such a scale and speed that it marks a titanic fork in the road for the future of American education.

My concern is not for my students’ brains or diminished skills. It is for the state of their souls.  

As teachers and parents, we should demand more than the trappings of achievement or a false sheen of perfection. The trophy matters little; it is the skill and the excellence behind the victory that counts. We teachers should want our students to be more than praised. We should want them, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, to be praiseworthy. 

It’s why my Gen X generation, as teenagers, was scandalized to learn the voices on our Milli Vanilli CDs didn’t belong to the guys holding the Grammy, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, but to studio singers instead. It’s why sports fans were heartbroken when Lance Armstrong’s miraculous comeback turned out to be a sham. It’s why Meg Wolitzer’s captivating novel The Wife—about a woman who secretly writes her husband’s celebrated works while he collects the acclaim—is such a powerful meditation on the cost of misrepresentation.

Education, at its best and most inspiring, is a process of constant if uneven human growth. All this rhapsodizing about substantive learning is moot if our young people do not feel morally compelled to present their work as their own. The constant use of AI to perform the tasks they ought to perform for themselves makes a farce of the entire enterprise of education.  

This moral failing is currently perpetuated by the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. But make no mistake—it is sewn into human nature. The catalyst is different, but the sin is the same: Bearing false witness. The root of Iago’s evil in Othello is his duplicity: “I am not what I am.” 

Our students have forgotten that there is immeasurable value in the authenticity of failure. Educators once expected a hue of vulnerability in their students, not because they reveled in critique or correction, but because revealing what one knows, however imperfectly, is the only way to deepen understanding and refine the self over time. A misplaced comma on an English essay, forgetting the Truman Doctrine on a history exam, or shifting the demand instead of the supply curve on an economics assignment are important steps toward becoming a better writer, knowing one’s history, or understanding the fundamentals of the free market. 

When our students stop being ours or anybody else’s students, they will step into the richer realm of adult life where our greatest joys are found not in our trophies but in our human connections, connections that are endlessly messy and yet are the deepest wells of purpose any of us will ever encounter. When one of my children is truly suffering, when my wife desperately needs my support, when a close friend requires my counsel, what they are going to get is not the clinical wisdom of a large language model, but the words and actions of a broken and deeply flawed human being trying his best to provide aid. This is why it was axiomatic among the Greeks that character is destiny. Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man, exhorts us: “Act well your part: there all the honor lies.”       

Our students are not truly acting their part as students. And it’s not entirely their fault. They’ve been swept along, even corrupted, by the habit of projecting a false perfection with the digital trinkets handed down from Silicon Valley. To the tech bros, my students aren’t learners; they’re customers. And they’re winning the battle for our children’s souls. First came the assault on their mental health through social media, then reels eroded their attention spans, and now AI drains their capacity to ever be fully, genuinely educated. 

How much more must we surrender to these high priests of the digital age?

And yet, what matters are the anchors we can throw overboard when the storms of life greet us. There are no shortcuts to kindness. No hack to becoming loyal. No artificial means of acquiring the fruits of human wisdom. If we don’t teach our students to fail with honor, they will never learn to live with integrity. A generation that cannot bear the miniscule shame of a misplaced comma or a forgotten fact will be pitifully defenseless against the larger indignities of life.

We learn through failure. But what happens if our students never learn how to learn? They will simply fail.