The easiest way to cheat on a college exam in 2026 isn’t to sneak in notes or glance at a neighbor’s paper. It’s to take a photo.
Upload the test to ChatGPT, Claude or any number of generative artificial intelligence, or AI, tools, and within seconds you’ve got something polished and coherent. No struggle, no thinking and maybe no learning. For universities, that’s not just a new form of cheating. It’s an existential problem.
At Arizona State University, where AI adoption has been encouraged, that tension is playing out in real time. Faculty and students have raised alarms that generative AI could erode the very thing higher education is supposed to build: the ability to think independently.
“Writing is thinking,” The State Press warned in an opinion.
If AI does the writing, what exactly are students learning? Vivek Gupta, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, has been thinking about that problem from a different angle.
“We’re not going to uninvent AI,” Gupta says. “So, the question isn’t how to ban it. The question is: How do you design systems where using AI in the wrong way becomes visible?”