The unauthorized A.I. use long game OR How not to burn out my empathy circuits in an online stats course

It is Week 1 in my online introduction to statistics course, and I've already detected unauthorized A.I. use in discussion forums. I'm not going to share the details of how I know, but in addition to technical details the writing is competent, factual, and bland. In just reading the suspected posts, they included course concepts we have yet to talk about, not really address the points being asked to discuss, and were just sad. In looking at many of these student's posts and in the online discussions I'm having with other faculty, I get the sense that many were using A.I. because they didn't feel like their honest writing would be appreciated, or awarded credit. This bums me out, as the struggle to make yourself understood is something every human engages in, and in statistics, it is a central problem. By using A.I. to write their posts for them, these students are missing the opportunity to struggle through these ideas. For example, I posted the following in a ge...