AI Cheating in Education

One-line: The thread running through We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric: students are off-loading writing and thinking onto LLMs, and the deeper diagnosis is that a factory-farmed, “codifiable” education had already hollowed out before AI arrived to expose it.

The shape of the argument (per Kyle’s research)

• The recurring student rationale: “this isn’t relevant to life, so why do it?” → just cheat. (Kyle’s note on the NY Mag reporting.)
• The cognitive cost: early studies link AI off-loading to deteriorating memory, problem-solving, and critical thinking, more pronounced in younger users — echoed by the slowing/reversing Flynn Effect (Robert Sternberg).
• The skills rebuttal (Tyler Cowen): education was already in crisis from “ideological capture, political monoculture, and extreme conformism”; AI literacy is itself the skill the future demands. Kyle treats this as valid-but-incomplete — skills serve ethos, but rhetoric and thymos are about more than marketable skill.
• The humanist defense (Troy Jollimore, Orin Starn, W.H. Auden): writing is how thinking happens — “language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought.” Losing the practice means losing the worldview.

Where this appears

• We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric / We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric - Research
• AI Slop Is Swamping a House Office That Drafts US Laws — the governance parallel: congressional staffers using AI to draft legislation lose the deep subject-matter understanding that comes from doing the drafting themselves.

Stub — expand as the theme recurs.