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Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing.
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Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing.
It’s not just the college students. I’m a professor—and these AI models offer keener, smarter, and more thorough suggestions than I do.
By Tyler Cowen
05.18.25 — Tyler Cowen Must Know
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Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing.
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There’s an epidemic of cheating in American education right now. The cheaters are the students of course, but the names of the cheating aids might be familiar to you: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Llama.

These characters are capable of doing extraordinary things: writing your persuasive essay in under a minute; knowing virtually all of history; and performing first-rate synthetic analyses of complicated questions. They are not yet geared up to do mathematics, but the best of these programs already can pass medical and bar exams. Oh, and they can do it for millions of students all at once, even sometimes all the way up to graduate-level work.

I’m talking, of course, about large language models (LLMs).

Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.

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Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Faculty Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New York Times best-seller. He was named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him "America's Hottest Economist." Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" of 2011. He co-writes a blog at www.MarginalRevolution.com, hosts a podcast Conversations with Tyler, and is co-founder of an online economics education project, MRU.org. He is also director of the philanthropic project Emergent Ventures.
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AI
Education
Artificial Intelligence
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