---
published: true
layout: post
title: Students Cheating with AI, But Really the Tech Companies Are Cheating
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/api-evangelist-images/students-cheating-with-ai-but-really-the-tech-companies-are-cheating.png
date: 2026-08-07
author: Kin Lane
tags:
  - Artificial Intelligence
  - Education
  - Higher Education
  - Ethics
  - Copyright
  - Culture
  - Storytelling
---
I was talking with my wife about the work I am doing with my intern this summer around the usage and adoption of artificial intelligence on campus. My wife is an expert in education technology, and a passionate anti-AI crusader. I was sharing my thoughts on the endless wave of stories about students cheating with AI, and, as she does so well in my world, she had a take I had not considered about all of those stories we keep reading.

While meeting with my intern to talk through her research, I mentioned that I did not find the topic of students cheating with AI particularly interesting. It is overdone. When I repeated that to my wife, she told me she finds the topic very interesting, precisely because the focus is always on the students, and that focus is what obfuscates the cheating being done by the artificial intelligence companies themselves. The models are trained on copyrighted material, on scraped work nobody consented to hand over, on reverse-engineered products, and on web-scale datasets that researchers have found to contain child sexual abuse material. Every one of those is somebody else's rule being broken at a scale no undergraduate could dream of, and none of it produces a disciplinary hearing.

On top of that, these companies work constantly to blow smoke up everyone's ass — fabricating stories, staging demos, and cheating on the benchmarks and tests being championed as the authoritative lines in the sand between what is real and what is not. There is an enormous amount of money on the line, and cheating is how you get ahead, and how you stay ahead, until you can [sell your shares on the secondary market](https://apievangelist.com/2026/08/05/scoring-the-secondary-market-does-the-hype-have-an-api/). The incentive structure does not merely tolerate cheating. It pays for it, and it pays best of all for the kind of cheating that is hard to audit from the outside.

As my wife reminds me, lying and cheating are the original baseline for artificial intelligence, and they are baked right into the Turing test. The imitation game does not measure whether a machine is intelligent. It measures whether a machine can convince a human being that it is something it is not. That is the founding benchmark of this entire field, and we are surprised when the industry built on top of it games its benchmarks. This is how "artificial intelligence" convinces us it is real — by lying to us, and by cheating on the very tests we use to determine who is human and who is not.

This is one of the reasons my wife's view of the world is so valuable to me. She does not see things the way I do. She never takes anything at face value. She reads a story and immediately starts asking what is behind it, and who benefits from it being told this way. I can do that some of the time, but it is not my default mode of operating, and I still fall for things more often than I would like. The students-cheating narrative being so loud is a good reminder that the headline story is rarely the real story. It is the one someone is paying to have published.

We should all be talking about how Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and the rest are cheating. Instead, for reasons that are not hard to trace back to who owns the megaphone, society has chosen to put the blame on young people trying to make their way into this messed-up world we adults are building for them. I have been [clear about where I stand on all of this](https://apievangelist.com/2026/08/03/my-current-stance-on-how-i-use-artificial-intelligence/), and this is a fresh reminder of why. The kids did not set the rules of the game they are being accused of gaming. The companies did, and they are cheating at their own game while pointing at an eighteen-year-old with an essay.