The problem is new. The solution is easy and traditional. The will is weak.

From I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats by Troy Jollimore.  The subheading is I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated.

Not an especially salubrious essay but revealing in its fashion.  He is a professor of philosophy and teaches at a university.  The subject of the essay is the challenge ChatGPT and its ilk represent to professors.  

Basically, in the humanities, students are measured on their ability to write sentient essays.  In the past eighteen months, it is becoming more prevalent for students to turn in essays which are either solely or largely authored by ChatGPT or equivalent.  

This obviously reflects hardly at all on the student's mastery of the material.  

So what is a professor to do.

The pragmatic answer is that you require the essays to be written in class.  

The problem is that none of the strategies available to me are without serious problems. I could, for instance, require all of these students to do their written work during class. That way, I would know they were the ones doing it. (Assuming, of course, I made them hand-write it.) In my experience, there is a fair bit of pressure on faculty not to lean on in-class written assignments. These are said to advantage students who think quickly, who perform well under pressure, who are more comfortable with pen and paper. Such concerns strike me as oddly one sided; after all, work done at home also privileges some students over others. I admit there is something to the point: there is a certain unfairness in grading solely on such a basis. But that unfairness pales compared to the greater injustice of some students submitting papers they laboured over while others turn in material conjured from a Magic Bag.

Jollimore rumbles on for a while about how writing in the classroom is not fully indicative of the student's capability and such quibbles.  

Then there is a lot of complaining about students and ethical dilemmas (he seems to have already written off the essay-writing-in-classroom idea.)

A long winded essay without much discipline or point.  

What seemed revealing to me was two-fold.

First.  This isn't complicated.  ChatGPT makes it easy for students to cheat and misrepresent their mastery of the material.  The obvious solution is a workable solution, not perfect but more than passable and with a long tradition in pedagogy.  This is not unfamiliar territory.

For all the fine talk of education and think preparation for life, I found it hard not to form the impression that classroom writing was not desired as a solution because of how revealing it might be about the low mastery and low skills of the students.  So be it.

The other impression I had was of how much of a cocoon, academics live in.  That is neither new nor unexpected but it is nearly impossible to read the following and believe to have been written by an informed adult with even a modicum of numeracy and historical knowledge.

North American college instructors are accustomed to adversity. Our society has always manifested strongly anti-intellectual tendencies. (In the past, this was perhaps more true in the US than Canada; I’m not sure how much, if at all, this remains the case.) One mainstream view is that practical intelligence, or street smarts, constitutes a more valuable form of intelligence. Those who emphasize theory, study, and scholarship are often viewed as marooned in ivory towers with expertise that is mostly, if not entirely, spurious.

Pure gibberish.  That universities are badly, even maliciously, managed (thinking of the exploitation of PhDs and the like), is well established.  After the debacle of Claudia Gray and her foursome before Congress, it is hard not to know that professors within universities are accustomed to the adversity of bad leadership.

But to claim that the US has strong anti-intellectual tendencies is just profound ignorance.  From the highly literate Puritans to universal education and literacy to our universities today, the US has been at the forefront of advancing education as a vehicle for self-improvement and productivity.  Money has been poured into K-12 and universities in torrential amounts since 1945, far faster than into almost any other sector (other than health).  To stand in that golden shower of resources and claim adversity?  Profoundly disgusting and disqualifying.  Clearly not a knowledgeable person.

The problem of the essay is real (AI cheating).  The answer is straight-forward and familiar (classroom work).

There are no ethical dilemmas to be mulled over ad nauseam.  There is no insurmountable problem.  There is no anti-intellectual tendencies.  All people want to know is whether you are doing your job, doing it well, and doing it efficiently.  Where there are hard trade-off decisions, make them.  Just like everyone else.

This essay reads almost as a swan song at the close of an era of intellectual self-indulgence and self-regard without responsibility for achieving that which needs to be achieved.