Seems to be a very wordy article that complains that only a proper education teaches you to think?
In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses.
The article also conflates AI in general with LLM. It's a common enough mistake to make these days, so I won't ding the author for that.
Summary of the article: contemporary LLMs aren't very useful for highfalutin liberal arts people (yet). (However they can already churn out the kind of essays and corporate writing that people do in practice.)
I think you missed the entire point of the article. They're not saying that AI cannot be useful in the way you describe. They're saying that too many people are using it as a shortcut to producing verbiage that mimics the outcomes of learning, missing out the valuable things that come from the process of learning.
Is there any evidence to suggest more people are cheating now that there is AI than before, or is everybody just flipping out because the cheaters have changed tactics?
It's almost always good to ask about what evidence we have.
I'd say that our prior should be that there's more cheating. My logic:
Almost any good or service gets consumed more when its price drops (especially if quality also goes up). Cheating has gotten massively cheaper in terms of effort: you no longer have hire a ghostwriter for your essay, or laboriously plagiarise passages from the literature yourself.
In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses.
The article also conflates AI in general with LLM. It's a common enough mistake to make these days, so I won't ding the author for that.
Summary of the article: contemporary LLMs aren't very useful for highfalutin liberal arts people (yet). (However they can already churn out the kind of essays and corporate writing that people do in practice.)