I had seen people paying for services to write research for them.
I had seen people translate research papers from foreign languages(Like Russian for example) to English to avoid doing any work.
And even much more methods were used in college.
The reality is people can’t seem to understand how broken are education systems and how science had flows that are only now brought to light and studied.
While AI made fraud more accessible for sure and made the problems worse, it’s only a sign of how much education were broken before it.
In my eyes, the last years put a bright spotlight on degrees worth that a lot of companies had started valuing them less and most probably the value of official degrees will keep falling down as the years pass by.
What I see as the main distinction between these forms and AI-enabled cheating is that the university is at least accrediting someone’s scholarship (assuming it goes through the system just fine). AI/LLMs output pure, unverifiable, black-box gobbledygook in a way that gums up the whole system. I’m not associated with a university anymore but have several friends who do teach at that level and the amount of opaque muck they’re having to trawl through just to try to prove if a human wrote any bit of the essay they’ve been handed in makes me glad I didn’t pursue my own career in education further.
I agree with the gist of your argument, I really do, but I don’t think that the current gen of AI cheaters are just a new form of a forever problem in academia.