The New Yorker 2026-05-31-1
The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.
Twelve professors put AI use at 50 to 90 percent of student writing and read the loss as the end of thinking, but the one calm voice, a CS instructor, already moved his course from writing code to grading AI-written code that is correct or subtly wrong. Generation was always the proxy; judgment was the skill, and the essay just got unbundled from it. The same gap drives enterprise AI, where generation is solved and verification was never built, which puts the pricing power in AI-resistant assessment and evaluate-the-output training rather than in another tutoring app.