Academics are increasingly warned that cheating assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) could pose new challenges to the world of learning and teaching (Cotton et al., 2023). To understand the future of AI we suggest academics remember yesterday’s pedagogical threat: essay mills.
As two academics, we explore the connections between these services and argue that if essay mills have anything to teach us, it is that responding to new technologies with regulation is not the answer.
In the UK there was a strong push to regulate essay mills – and it didn’t work. Essay mills were made illegal by the Skills and Post-16 Education Act in April 2022, but contract cheating persists due to a loophole or legal grey zone.
