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Something I found interesting about reading this thread is that it made me wonder how many people think of ChatGPT as primarily a tool for writing things for you I use ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini possibly 100+ times a day and NONE of those uses are to produce writing that I then share with other people

I wonder if I'm an outlier in this? Are most ChatGPT users leaning on it more for writing on their behalf? Aside from writing code and being a thesaurus I see it mainly as a curiosity engine - a tool for helping explore a weird, blurry, occasionally misleading but absolutely vast pool of knowledge

This fascinating (and clearly well sourced) piece from New York Magazine does seem to indicate that many of today's students are All In on having it write for them though nymag.com/intelligence...

I don't know that it's *very* well sourced. One central source is the well-known founder of a startup to create a cheating tool. So his testimony that "cheating is effective and everyone is doing it" is basically promotional material for his company.

Yes, certainly the anecdotal reports from professors are the same anecdotal reports I hear from colleagues. There's no question that, if you're still relying on take-home 5-page essays, you will get a lot of LLM prose!

And, like you, that's never (or almost never) what I use the models for myself. But then I'm not required to write a lot of boilerplate. Students are still inhabiting a world where "ability to generate 5 pages on this book" is being used as proof that they read the book.

this is the fundamental problem! Education is maybe the only context where producing formulaic writing lacking a direct function beyond the change that writing it induces in the writer, is valued. everywhere else there are huge economic incentives to automate this and school is collateral damage