There’s an epidemic of cheating in American education right now. The cheaters are the students of course, but the names of the cheating aids might be familiar to you: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Llama.

These characters are capable of doing extraordinary things: writing your persuasive essay in under a minute; knowing virtually all of history; and performing first-rate synthetic analyses of complicated questions. They are not yet geared up to do mathematics, but the best of these programs already can pass medical and bar exams. Oh, and they can do it for millions of students all at once, even sometimes all the way up to graduate-level work.

I’m talking, of course, about large language models (LLMs).

Accurate data is hard to come by, but one estimate suggests that up to 90 percent of college students have used ChatGPT to do their homework. Rather than debating the number, professors and teachers simply ought to assume (and I do) that your students have an invisible, very high-quality helper. As current norms weaken further, more students learn about AI, and the competitive pressures get tougher, I expect the practice to spread to virtually everyone.