In either case, we need to change our standards around mastery of subject matter.
My comment from a few days ago.
The origin was a conversation with a girl who said she'd been pulled into a professor's office and told she was going to be reported to whatever her university's equivalent of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity is over using AI - a matter of academic honesty.
The professor made it clear in the syllabus that "no AI" was allowed to be used, spent the first few days of class repeating it, and yet, this student had been assessed by software to have used it to write a paper.
She had used Grammarly, not ChatGPT, she contended. They were her words and ideas, reshaped, not the sole product of a large language model.
In a world where style suggestion services are built into everything from email to keyboards, what constitutes our own words? Why have ghostwritten novels topped the NYT Best Sellers for decades while we rejected the fitness of a young presidential hopeful over a plagiarized speech?
Integrity doesn't exist without honesty. Ghostwriting is when one person shapes another person's truth into something coherent and gives them credit. A plagiarized speech is when someone takes another person's truth as their own, falsely. What lines define that in tools to combat the latter from the former, and how do we communicate and enforce what is and isn't appropriate?
Writing essays isn't just about your ideas. It's also a tool to teach communication skills. The goal of an essay isn't to produce a readable paper, until you start your PhD at least; it's to teach a variety of skills.
I don't really care about the AI generated spam that fills the corporate world because corporate reports are write-only anyway, but you can't apply what may be tolerated in the professional world to the world of education.
It's still not cheating. English assignments aren't about the practice of writing English, you stop doing that in primary school. It's analysis of English texts in which people have been using spelling and grammar checkers since their inception. It's not even cheating to have someone proofread and edit your paper, it's usually encouraged, and Grammarly is just a worse-than-human editor.
Saying "AI" becomes meaningless if we're all using it to mean different things. If I use computer vision to perform cell counts, or if an ESL student uses deepl to help translate a difficult to express idea, would we be in breach of student conduct?
The real answer is "ask your professor first", but with how second nature many of these tools have become in P12 education, it may not occur to students that it might be necessary to ask.
But I think it's actually not all that different, particularly in the context of "essays teach writing." It used to be human work to analyze sentences for passive voice, remember the difference between there/their/they're, and understand how commas work, but now the computer handles it.
(Relevant sidenote: Am I using commas correctly here? IDK! I've never fully internalized the rules!)