A Third of My Online College Students Are AI-Powered Spambots. Now What?

> The scam is for some mastermind to register a fake student to collect financial aid, enroll that spambot student in courses, and let AI handle submitting some of the assignments. This allows the person behind the spambot to collect financial aid money...

> ...if you ask the AI to generate a visual analysis of the Mona Lisa, it has a lot to go on and will do a pretty good job. But when you ask it to do a less well-known artwork with little to no writing about it, the AI falters.

> So, here’s my plea to others in higher education: get educated about how AI works and try to get good at identifying AI on your own, not just with these so-called “detectors.” Make note of things that seem weird, and bring them to the attention of your department chair or dean.

> [community] colleges have tight budgets and limited enrollments for specific classes, so these spambots take resources away from real students who actually need them, both in terms of potential financial aid and in terms of classroom capacity.

> If you think higher education matters like I do, it’s up to us to protect it.

SO - systematic financial fraud. And a (probably ill-paid and over-worked) adjunct art history/appreciation instructor at a community college is making a plea for her peers to become AI-savvy financial fraud policemen.

There is no mention in the whole article of actual policemen, or other law enforcement. Extrapolating a bit, I'll guess that the only "state authority" that exists is the little community college. And its only power is to cut off the financial aid money for one of the unknown fraudster's fake identities.

My Question: Where the F* are all the $billions that modern Americans pour into "our" 3-letter-masterminded, cyber-dystopian police state being squandered?