Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anything. They're not learning about confabulations, they're not learning about scaling laws or tokenization, they're not learning to use the API, they're not running multiple models to get a feel for how they think differently, they ain't doing none of that shit you wishfully think they are - because they're cheating to minimize effort so they can go do something else like watch Tiktok. (Even Lee, who is by far the most successful and sophisticated user profiled in OP, is just dumping out stuff as fast as he can to try to make a buck.)

They are copy-pasting the assignment from Blackboard to ChatGPT and vice-versa. As the article points out, they usually aren't even reading the outputs to check that the essay doesn't suddenly start bloviating about Aristotle.

And no one needs to pay a college wage premium, or any wage, for that:

> He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.