Machines now produce fluent paragraphs on demand. That is a real change in the furniture of study. A student who uses such a tool to check a draft, to see another phrasing, or to recover a forgotten term is not thereby a fraud. Fluency is no longer scarce in the way it was when every sentence had to be cut by hand.
It is also true that much school writing was already fake: pages produced to look like thought. A machine that can imitate that fake writing has exposed how little some assignments ever asked of a speaker. If a generator can satisfy the task, the task was never a test of understanding. That exposure is useful. It should make us more severe about what we ask speech to do, not less.
There is a further truth here. A good reader has always used help — a dictionary, a model paragraph, a teacher’s recasting of a clumsy sentence. The new tools are faster and more fluent. They are not the first time a student has seen another wording of his own thought.
What is true, then, is the change in scarcity, the exposure of empty assignments, and the legitimacy of some kinds of help. What has not yet been shown is that the arts of grammar and rhetoric have therefore become optional, or that a fluent page is already a speaker.