Parents are starting to fret about lunch packs, school uniforms and schoolbooks. School leavers who have university places are wondering what freshers' week will be like. And some university professors, especially in the humanities, will be apprehensively pondering how to deal with students who are already more adept users of large language models (LLMs) than they are. They're right to be concerned. As Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media and computer science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it: "If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI cheating and detection arms race plays out in the background."

Kyle Jensen, the director of Arizona State University's writing programs, is gearing up for the fall semester. The responsibility is enormous: Each year, 23,000 students take writing courses under his oversight. The teachers' work is even harder today than it was a few years ago, thanks to AI tools that can generate competent college papers in a matter of seconds. A mere week after ChatGPT appeared in November 2022, The Atlantic declared that "The College Essay Is Dead." Two school years later, Jensen is done with mourning and ready to move on.

AI surveillance might deter cheaters. But sometimes these detectors get it wrong, too. And even a small "false positive" error rate means some students could be wrongly accused -- an experience with potentially devastating long-term effects. After I wrote about the arrival of the AI detector from Turnitin, I heard from many angry high school and college students (and some of their parents) claiming they had been falsely accused of AI cheating. So I asked some of them how they handled the accusations, and I also sought some advice from experts in academic integrity and AI.

That's what the software concluded about a student's paper. One of the professors in the academic program I direct had come across this finding and asked me what to do with it. Then another one saw the same result--100 percent AI--for a different paper by that student, and also wondered: What does this mean? The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it's possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to "use" AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating. The software that had flagged our student's papers was also multilayered: Canvas, our courseware system, was running Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, which had recently installed a new AI-detection algorithm.

Half of college students are likely already using ChatGPT to cheat, experts have estimated. They warn the revolutionary AI has created a cheating epidemic that poses a huge threat to the integrity of academia. 'At present, well over half of students are likely using AI tools to cheat the education system in exams or essays, but it wouldn't surprise me if that number were already higher.' Could educators resort to written tests to deal with AI cheating? He added: 'If educators make the mistake of ignoring the threat of AI-based cheating, I can honestly see more than 90 percent of students cheating in this way [in future].' OpenAI's new GPT-4 update (GPT-3 and GPT-4 are the models which underlie ChatGPT) is able to get 90 percent on a huge number of exams, including the American bar exam.