A college senior at Stanford describes how AI has changed classes: cheating using AI “has become omnipresent” with students “fudging just about everything”
New York TimesTheo Baker
Context & Ripple Effects
Related coverage traces a shift from early uncertainty over whether chatbots had materially raised cheating rates to repeated reports that instructors struggle to detect AI-assisted work. College-focused accounts have increasingly described the problem as systemic, while students have also turned to “humanizer” tools designed to evade detection.
This Stanford account matters as a campus-level indication that the issue is no longer confined to isolated misuse or take-home writing: students reportedly see AI-mediated “fudging” across routine coursework. The earlier Stanford high-school survey offers an important counterpoint, suggesting the scale and form of misuse can vary by setting.
First-order effects
Stanford instructors and students face a more immediate trust problem around submitted work, with conventional signals of authorship becoming less reliable.
Students using AI to complete or alter assignments gain a short-term advantage over peers who do not, while students using legitimate assistance may face greater suspicion.
Second-order effects
Faculty and institutions are likely to lean further on assessment formats that make student process or live performance more visible, rather than relying solely on finished written submissions.
The arms race documented in related coverage intensifies: detection products must contend not only with generated text but with tools intended to make that text appear human-written.
Third-order effects
If these reports continue across campuses, higher education may have to redefine what independent work, permitted assistance, and proof of learning mean in AI-accessible courses.
The likely structural pressure is toward assessments and course designs that are harder to outsource to generic AI, though the earlier high-school findings caution against treating one campus account as a universal measure of prevalence.
The trend: This is one data point in the broader shift from AI as a writing aid to AI as a force reshaping how educational institutions verify learning and enforce academic integrity.
ChatGPT arrived on campus two months after we did. Now, as this graduating college class of 2026 approaches commencement, A.I. has already permanently changed how we think and behave. We were the experiment. My essay in @nytopinion Sunday Review: [image]
AI has accelerated the already-in-motion transition of “is this going to be on the test?” to “how does this get me paid?” school is so expensive directly and in the prep to get in that this all makes sense.
“The money is a big part of it. A.I. has merely accelerated a trend that was already underway at Stanford and has been reflected by many of the country's most corporatized universities: Education itself can be seen as a secondary goal to enabling future success, frequently
“AI is everything,"@tab_delete says in his @NYT opinion piece."Nearly all of higher education has been overtaken by this technology,and Stanford is a case study in how far it can go. For the past four years, my classmates and I have been the subjects of a high-stakes experiment."
Of all the ways AI has affected the latest batch of Stanford graduates, this feels the most corrosive. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o... By @tab-delete.bsky.social. [image]
The chef's kiss in this essay about how ambition is destroying education at Stanford is the note at the end, where we learn that the author, a Stanford senior, has a forthcoming book on the subject. — www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o...
can the hugely important conversation on the erosion of trust & AI really be delivered by uber nepo baby Theo Baker? for students facing declining social mobility, using AI for homework probably doesn't feel any less fraudulent than being born to media aristocracy — www.nytimes…
Observation of the moment (at Stanford University, the third highest-ranked university in the world): “Cheating has become omnipresent. I don't know a single person who hasn't used A.I. to get through some assignment in college.” — www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/o...
Big thank you to @anandwrites for this amazing review of HOW TO RULE THE WORLD! “This may not be a world you want to know about, but it is one you need to know about, because it is deciding about your life, even if you have limited power to decide about it,” he writes.
Theo Baker just wanted to go to college. He ended up at the rapacious, awkward center of the world, where a rising dweebocracy is plotting to rule, a new Wall Street but in Silicon Valley, with more pimples and less eye contact. My review of @tab_delete:
A Stanford student talks about how rampant using AI to cheat is at the college. — This is on rationale for reduced hiring of entry level workers. — If white collar jobs have become primarily reviewing the work of AI, why hire people who never learned how to do the work?