Students cheating using LLMs

I've been thinking a bit about how all my teachers implored us not to just use Wikipedia for research because anyone could edit it.

I feel like I remember teachers being technically wrong about how often errors actually cropped up in Wikipedia vs. other encyclopedias and largely missing the trees of let's say Encyclopædia Britannica also not being a research tool as much as a reference manual, and that doing research requires doing actual research and reading of primary sources.

The problem with how students were using wikipedia was a mixture of students not really grasping (or not caring about) what the learning process is about, and the bigger problem of the structure of schooling not actually being about fostering that learning and understanding (in spite of teachers often working toward that goal).

But also... the joke about wikipedia is [citation needed] because, for whatever faults and ideological slant wikipedia has in its approach, it is genuinely trying to provide an accurate and well-supported catalogue of formatted information and LLMs are lying machines. Both are susceptible to bad actors but wikipedia has a defined process for identifying and removing incorrect and malicious information and actively works to signal unreliability by noting where claims are being made without sufficient backing.