Because people don't ask, "How do I do a Fourier Transformation?" The say, "Do this math problem for me and show so the steps."

A half-wrong cheating tool can still be useful if you haven't done any studying at all.

AIs appear impressive because they're mostly right. That is: in many areas they'll "know" more about a topic than a random person, so to the novice they're really impressive.

It's just that being "better than the average person" at a task is still pretty shitty compared to someone who specializes in that task.

It's why so many CEOs find them impressive. Their results look good to the untrained.

Because people don't cheat to gain knowledge. They cheat to fulfill a societal norm (getting the diploma/certification etc) that says they "succeeded". Cheating is basically just taking a shortcut to an outcome without gaining the benefit of doing the actual work.

The usefulness of cheating in this scenario is that they can get the result the college requires without doing the work, and still receiving the benefit of achieving said result.

Because we don't generally explain to people why we school them and teach them specific things. We fail quite badly at expressing the why of learning specific skills and we have known that for awhile. AI just created a readily accessible shortcut for some to thinking because we don't and have basically never explained that a lot of school work is about teaching basic ideas and then developing skills to let people scale those ideas up using critical thinking and first principles. We are teaching people to think, not just to know.

Because it is very convincing. It generates great essays. The problem is that it has no way to evaluate truth.

Because they're confidently wrong.