I had seen people paying for services to write research for them.
I had seen people translate research papers from foreign languages(Like Russian for example) to English to avoid doing any work.
What I see as the main distinction between these forms and AI-enabled cheating is that the university is at least accrediting someone's scholarship (assuming it goes through the system just fine). AI/LLMs output pure, unverifiable, black-box gobbledygook in a way that gums up the whole system. I'm not associated with a university anymore but have several friends who do teach at that level and the amount of opaque muck they're having to trawl through just to try to prove if a human wrote any bit of the essay they've been handed in makes me glad I didn't pursue my own career in education further.
I agree with the gist of your argument, I really do, but I don't think that the current gen of AI cheaters are just a new form of a forever problem in academia.
