This conversation is not actually a new topic; this is simply the latest edition of "How do we get students to stop cheating?" AI is the latest technique of cheating available to students, but we have actually known the answer for quite a long time. The way you get students to stop cheating is to get them to value their education.

People generally use AI in areas they are ignorant in or to do scut work. Personally, I really enjoy playing the video game Monster Hunter, in which creating armor sets can be very complicated. I once asked ChatGPT to make an armor set and it gave me a pile of garbage. I was only able to recognize it as garbage because of my deep understanding of the game. I have attached great value to learning the deeper mechanics of this hobby and so, I have no desire to offload that labor to a chatbot.

In the USA, education is assigned very little value. School is mostly seen as a way to get a job, not as a way to acquire more knowledge to better yourself. You need to do well in school so you can go to a good college so you can get a well paying job. You should study computer science because it pays a lot. You should become a doctor because it pays a lot. The entirety of education is a means to an end, something you gotta get out of the way to live your life. Education is seen as scut work.

A typical high school student takes an AP exam not because they want to prove they have a higher level mastery of a subject, but because a good score is worth college credits. A college student chooses their major thinking about job opportunities a degree will provide them. We tell children not to study what they love because that is how you become a starving artist.

Our society does not value education. Children are responding appropriately by relegating it to scut work. It's not that the children of today are uniquely incapable, they are simply the distillation of decades of education devaluation. Ask a football student to do math and they might be hesitant, but ask them to analyze their favorite team's average field goal success rates and they'll pull out detailed spreadsheets of percentages at different yard lengths.

If we want students to stop cheating, we have to give them a reason to value their education. While I support a ban on AI usage in the classroom, this is ultimately treating a symptom without addressing the source.