I don't know why you want to hobble your child. He will be generating essays but one day he will be in a situation he cannot generate an essay, he won't be able to google, like say a presentation to a client or colleagues, and he will be caught, whereas his competition who do not need a crutch to write (or for a presentation, say make arguments on his feet) will not. You certainly don't need to overwork your kid, but why even bother educating your child if this is how you approach education? May be he needs to legally finish high school, but after HS why not let him chatGPT his way into a job if you think it is sufficient?

>your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.

This is absolutely a terrible attitude. Who cares about the "top essay" if they're all AI generated. None of the 25 students are good students, and unless they will fail into a good job at daddy's hedgefund, you will simply not become a proficient adult letting chatGPT do your homework for you. The entire point of writing essays is to formulate opinions and thoughts and defend them. I understand school sucks and sometimes you have to write essays for things you don't care about, and that is a problem. But, at some point, you need to learn how to write if you want to be a professional. Not doing so just means you're holding yourself back for reasons I don't quite understand.