Students have never understood the value of school work. It's a hard thing to understand. None of the assignments are asked because the teacher wants to know the answer. They already know. So it all closely resembles busy work. AI is perfectly designed to do busy work.

Students have always looked for ways to minimize the work load, and often the response has been to increase the load. In some cases it has effectively become a way to tech you to get away with cheating (a lesson this even has some real-world utility).

Keeping students from wasting their tuition is an age-old, Sisyphean task for parents. School is wasted on the young. Unfortunately youth is also when your brain is most receptive to it.

Isn't that the core of how universities operate, in the first place?

Sure, you could get an education for cheap from a community college, or free from various online sources, or for the best education possible, get paid to learn on the job. If you attend a university though, you're getting prestige by showing how much of your money, or someone else's money, you can burn through.

It's not like anyone's taking undergraduate classes at Harvard or Stanford because the teaching assistants actually instructing are going to provide above-average instruction. They aren't even concerned with tenured professors teaching performance; they put publishing metrics first.