Earlier this year, Advait Paliwal developed an AI tool that can function as a student. Einstein was given an email and password to log into Canvas, a portal where professors from universities across the country upload their presentations and list of assignments. Bots can attend lectures, write essays, and do homework. Paliwal, 22, said he created it as a joke to a friend who was stuck in class and had no intention of coding the ultimate cheating tool. It ultimately became the latest flashpoint in the debate over AI and cheating in universities.
Einstein went through a typical, fleeting cycle of online outrage after Paliwal posted on X. At its peak, he says, 100,000 people were using Einstein. People were angry and asked, “What’s the point of being alive?” One Bluesky user wrote: Paliwal said he has received cease-and-desist letters, including one from Canvas’ parent company, which did not respond to requests for comment. Under pressure, he shut down the bot. But the experience changed the way Paliwal, who graduated with a degree in computer science two years ago, views higher education. “That’s when I started thinking, ‘What’s the value of an education if you can literally do all the work yourself?’
Next month, the Class of 2026 will leave college campuses and dive into the working world. They are also a class of ChatGPT. Since OpenAI’s flagship chatbot debuted in the fall of its freshman year, the collective has been a testing ground for technologies that are upending higher education. AI is currently reshaping the workforce, posing the biggest threat to entry-level jobs typically held by college graduates.
These motivated new hires could become the AI-native employees that companies are eager to hire. “The tide is turning in their favor,” said Michelle Volberg, founder and CEO of recruiting software company Twill, about new graduates. Recruiters are looking beyond GPAs and resumes to select the right candidates for the changing employment landscape. For new graduates who spent their undergraduate years learning how to optimize AI, “Recruiters have an assumption that you work differently, work differently with AI, and have different characteristics that they’re looking for.”
What is the value of a diploma obtained by deception?
On the other hand, a college student who outsourced years of homework to an AI could be designed to sharpen his reasoning and creativity. “Anyone who uses AI in that way is making themselves vulnerable to today’s very dynamic labor market. AI is already very good, and its capabilities are improving rapidly,” said Zach Mabel, director of research at Georgetown University’s Education and Workforce Center. “What gives people the best chance of being competitive in this type of labor market is having skills that complement technology,” he says. “Those are critical thinking skills.”
Despite talk of college extinction, many white-collar employers still want to hire college graduates. But what is the value of a diploma obtained through deception?
Cheats have been around for as long as testing has been done. A study conducted in the early 1960s found that about half of American college students cheated. They relied on others who had already taken the test to provide answers and questions, imitated others, plagiarized, and even sat in the place of other students during exams. The widespread use of the Internet on campus in the 1990s and 2000s created an easier route to plagiarism, and cheating evolved with technology.
“Most of us are willing to cheat under the right circumstances,” says James Lang, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on academic integrity. Many students cheat under intense pressure or when the task appears to conflict with required real-world knowledge. AI further enhances this problem. This technology makes it easier to cheat in class while also disrupting the work that young white-collar workers would do in the real world as they prepare to graduate. “People are wondering: Is my hard work and effort worth it in producing these skills that AI can reproduce or imitate?”
A Gallup poll conducted last fall found that more than half of college students said their school discourages or prohibits the use of AI. Still, more than half said they use AI in their weekly lessons, and about 20% said they use it daily. Among those who use AI at least monthly, 65% said they felt AI was very or extremely important for career preparation, and 70% said they felt very strongly about using AI to improve their grades. According to academic integrity software Turnitin, 15% of papers run using its AI detection software are considered to be more than 80% likely to have been generated by AI. This is a five-fold increase from three years ago, when 3% of papers triggered that highest level of warning.
Seniors who got by with sloppy AI use may now face the consequences of letting AI do their job when they show up at the office.
The ChatGPT essay takeover was just the beginning. Next came text humanizers and word spinners that aim to obfuscate traces of AI in text. Columbia University dropout Roy Chung-Gin Lee, who made headlines in 2025 by creating a tool that allows software engineers to “cheat” in technical interviews, raised $15 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz last summer for his desktop app Cluruy, which listens in on meetings and provides real-time assistance and responses. According to the company, it has more than 500,000 professional users. “We built Cluely so you no longer have to think alone,” the app’s website says. “While everyone else is guessing, you’re already right. And yes, the world will call it cheating. But so did calculators. So did spell check. So did Google.” Last summer, Grammarly announced eight agents who can evaluate drafts of essays against assignment rubrics and suggest improvements.
On Reddit, students discuss the main points of their essays. Some people are so dependent on ChatGPT that they ask for advice on how to leave it. Some people feel overwhelmed and unable to work without AI. Here are some tips for generating essays with AI and painstakingly typing them into Google Docs so professors can track their activities to defeat allegations of cheating. Some things can seem more tedious than actually writing the paper. In a comment clearly entered by a real person, one user opined that it doesn’t really matter how you get there: “A degree is a degree, but that’s all that matters.”
Annie Chechitelli, chief product officer at Turnitin, believes higher education and liberal arts degrees retain their value. But fourth-year graduates who get away with sloppy and thoughtless use of AI could face the consequences of letting AI do their jobs when they show up at the office, she says. “I think they would be surprised by the lack of acceptance of AI in everyday communication, writing, and problem-solving at work,” she says. “They’re going to be asked difficult questions, but I think it might help you in your first job in a positive way,” especially when it comes to dealing with the “silly” questions young workers have when they get their first job, like how to fill out a W2 or format an email.
Some students are building firewalls around their intended use of AI to protect the learning process. “If the AI is doing all the tasks and doing all the work, there’s definitely a line between that and clearly cheating,” Matthew Hsu, a history researcher at Duke University, told me. Xu also works on the product side of Turbo AI, an app that turns class notes into podcasts, notecards, quizzes, and other learning formats, and plans to continue working after graduation. As a student, Xu uses it to analyze concepts in his history class and create flashcards in his Chinese class. This will make studying much easier and will not allow you to generate answers to assignments. “When AI helps us think, things change dramatically.”
Sharif Abrar Labib, a fourth-year information technology student at the University of Texas at Dallas, said he started using AI to check grammar during his freshman year. He then used it to create concise notes for open-book exams. He has also come up with other uses, such as creating a chatbot to break down course syllabi. But Labib values his writing. One reason is that he always enjoys it. He told me that he had seen his classmates compose essays for classes and then copy and paste them. “What they’re doing isn’t very effective. After all, they’re not learning anything.”
Universities carry the social weight of preserving original thought while preparing students for the workforce, but that responsibility is being hampered by increasing pressure from employers who expect work-ready graduates who know how to use AI. University classes are often slow to catch up with the latest innovations, and without established AI best practices, teaching with technology has become uneven. There’s also the challenge of balancing exposure to AI with the friction of flexing your critical thinking muscles. A study published last year by MIT suggests that using ChatGPT to write essays can make you lazy and more dependent on AI. In controlled studies, participants who were instructed to use ChatGPT “consistently performed worse on a neural, linguistic, and behavioral level” compared to participants who wrote their essays with the help of Google or who received no assistance.
AI is both a lifeline and a crutch. Lynn Pasculella, president of the Association of American Universities, said this has democratized some types of tutoring. “Having instant explanations, immediate feedback, and assistance with complex tasks facilitates learning and makes students feel more comfortable experimenting and adapting, which are valuable skills in a rapidly changing workforce,” she says.
The employment rate for recent college graduates remained just below 6% in December, the highest since 2021. AI is reshaping the roles of lower-level jobs, and as much of the menial white-collar work is taken over by AI, companies are looking for people who can join the workforce immediately rather than undergo training. And it brings about changes in the classroom as well. Since students have access to AI starting in first grade, “it shapes how they approach learning,” Pasquerella said. “They rely less on memorization and more on knowing how to ask the right questions and use tools effectively.” However, there is “a real risk that students will be overburdened with their thought processes.”
Lang agrees, pointing out the precious rarity of a college campus and its access to academics and colleagues that are not often replicated at other times in our lives. “We must advocate for the value of higher education in community with teachers and students,” he says.
amanda huber I’m a senior correspondent for Business Insider, covering the technology industry. She writes about the biggest technology companies and trends.
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