This month’s uproar - one professor quietly letting ChatGPT whip up lecture slides - makes it sound like the first time a teacher ever outsourced a task. Spoiler: it isn’t even close.
🧑🎓 Academia’s Original Ghostwriters
Grad students have been ghost-writing quiz questions, polishing problem sets, and grading mountains of blue books since forever.
Textbook publishers pitch ready-made slide decks so polished they practically come with their own laser pointer. And peer graders? They’re the reason mid-term results show up before Thanksgiving instead of sometime in March.
🤖 Same Delegation, New Assistant
We all knew the help was there- we just pretended it didn’t count because the helpers had campus IDs. Now, swap a human for a language model, and suddenly the pitchforks come out. Same delegation, different address.
🔍 The Visibility Problem
The difference isn’t morality; it’s visibility. A TA leads recitations, a publisher’s logo sits in the corner of a slide, but a generative model slips in unnoticed until a student spots an AI tell.
When the invisible helper gets exposed, students feel duped-not because outsourcing exists, but because nobody said so up front.
The real issue isn’t “Is it cheating?” It’s “Do I still get what I paid for?” If a professor turns raw AI output into a sharp, thoughtful lesson, the value is intact.
✅ Normalize the Credit
So maybe the takeaway isn’t to ban the bot, but to retire the fantasy of the lone-genius lecturer. Academia has always been collaborative; the collaborators just wore name tags that we could see. ChatGPT is the newest helper on the roster, minus the coffee habit. A quick nod in the syllabus-“AI assisted in drafting these materials, final edits by yours truly” - would turn today’s scandal into tomorrow’s shrug.
