Atlantic: student AI use breeds 'society of cheats,' Rollert says

"Students' use of AI is teaching them to cut corners, disdain rules, and believe that integrity is for suckers and wimps." That sentence sits near the top of John Paul Rollert's essay "A Society of Cheats," published in The Atlantic on August 30, 2026. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared it.

Rollert, who teaches leadership and business ethics, argues that the deepest damage from undergraduate AI use is moral before it is intellectual. Students, he writes, are "habituating themselves to cheating as a way of life."

His argument turns on a distinction. "To say that someone 'earned' something is to apply a moral distinction to what one acquires," he writes, and "Not only can we get things we didn't earn, but we can also obtain things we don't deserve." Undergraduates outsourcing their papers, he says, are being trained in the second category. "Students are spending a lot of time learning to be thieves nowadays."

The classroom evidence he cites is stylistic first. Student writing, he says, has been coming back with "squeaky-clean grammar, a superabundance of bullet points, and fairly robotic reiteration of facts rather than the pleasing lurch of original thinking." From there he extrapolates. This cohort, he predicts, will enter professional life with "a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules." He expects "a generation of incompetents roughly a decade behind them."

The essay closes where its title does. "We will be a society of cheats."