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.
And even much more methods were used in college.
The reality is people can't seem to understand how broken are education systems and how science had flows that are only now brought to light and studied.
While AI made fraud more accessible for sure and made the problems worse, it's only a sign of how much education were broken before it.
In my eyes, the last years put a bright spotlight on degrees worth that a lot of companies had started valuing them less and most probably the value of official degrees will keep falling down as the years pass by.
I don't see how I could possibly cheat during my engineering studies. Every exams was different from previous years, you had to detail the calculation steps, you had to be so fluent with using the formulas and fast at calculating in order to even have a chance to answer all questions. Most exams were calibrated so that only the top students have just enough time to finish.