Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review:
With increasing availability and sophistication of chatbots, we teachers are seeing a drastic decline in the cost of what in Great Britain is called “commissioning”—that is, getting someone else to do your academic work for you. There are many forms of academic cheating, at various levels of schooling, but commissioning by university students is the one I want to discuss today.
Long, long ago, in a pre-Internet galaxy far away, commissioning was costly and therefore rare. It was a bespoke commodity: Typically you’d find someone smart and pay him or her to write an essay for you, or even (this could be done only in large lecture classes whose students were anonymous to their professors) take an exam for you. The talent was almost always local; in a large university, cynical or broke graduate students could supplement their meager stipends quite significantly by catering to the anxieties of academically marginal undergrads.
More here.