I mean it's acting as a great filter for a bunch of people who would've picked up the closest available tech any other time to do their work for them.

Before AI, it was websites that offered homework/essay writing services by outsourcing it to students in the global south, or just copying work and changing a few words to pass it off as your own.

Before that, it was copy-pasting Wikipedia/websites verbatim or paying something in meatspace to do the work for you.

We sorta end up with an amalgam of those previous things more sensibly, such as using Wikipedia for preliminary research and looking for useful primary sources, or using online services that offer personal tutoring or guides on subjects. It's dialectical materialism in play at an academic level.

AI is just yet another technology that will be abused because it's in the valley of being massively overhyped socially but poorly understood by its users and its moderators. It sucks because these people may get an easy ride through their education only to find that they know nothing that'll get them a stable employment or transferable skills to make them rounded human beings. On the upside, in a sense, this is no different to every generation before us; people ride the technology of the era to avoid learning the skills that are fundamental to picking up the next technological boundary.

TLDR yeah the short term is gonna be really annoying and shitty but I do believe this is another techno-fad that'll blow over and the people getting it easy right now are just delaying their education temporarily.