Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee told me recently.

Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia. (His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.” Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said.** “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”**

President Trump said Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “disrespected” the United States during a fiery Oval Office meeting and that he was “not ready for peace.”

“We had a very meaningful meeting in the White House today. Much was learned that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the meeting.

“It’s amazing what comes out through emotion, and I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,” Trump continued. “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

Trump on Truth Social:

It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future. I negotiated this Deal with Lip-Bu Tan, the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company. The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars. This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL. Building leading edge Semiconductors and Chips, which is what INTEL does, is fundamental to the future of our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

President Trump on Tuesday appeared to blame Ukraine’s leaders for the three-year war with Russia, arguing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “should have never started it.”

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after massing troops on the border and demanding a ban on Ukraine ever joining the NATO alliance. The invasion took place nearly a decade after Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Trump vowed to end the war during his presidential campaign and on Tuesday repeated his claim that the war would never have started if he had been president. He spoke after U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia without Ukraine officials. “I think I have the power to end this war. And I think it’s going very well,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on the heels of the meeting between U.S. and Russian officials.

“But today I heard, ‘Oh, well we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump continued. “You should’ve ended it in three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”

Trump went on to rail against former President Biden as “so pathetic” before again criticizing Zelensky. “Look, you have leadership — and I like him personally. He’s fine. But I don’t care about personally. I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened, even without the United States.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Saudi Arabia that any final agreement would have to be acceptable to Ukraine and Europe, as well as Russia.

The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would eliminate federal taxes on tips, advancing with the help of Democrats a top campaign promise of President Trump.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) brought the bill to the floor with the expectation that it would be blocked, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declined to. It passed via unanimous consent (UC).

Cruz noted in his floor remarks in support of Rosen’s UC request that the Nevada senators — Rosen and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) — relayed that roughly 25 percent of Nevada workers rely on tips. Rosen said that the Silver State has more tipped workers per capita than any other.

The Texas Republican spoke up in support of the bill immediately after, explaining the genesis of the push by Trump during the campaign and hailing it as a moment of “political genius” by the president to back the idea.

The bill, the No Tax on Tips Act, will now head to the House, where the provision is expected to be passed one way or another — be it via the stand-alone measure or Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that will extend tax cuts.

The legislation would establish a new tax deduction of up to $25,000 for tips, among other things.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) shattered a nearly 68-year record this evening, as he spoke on the Senate floor for 24 hours and 19 minutes to protest President Donald Trump‘s tenure.

Booker started at 7 p.m. ET on Monday and has held the floor since then. His marathon has been broken up only by Senate colleagues who he has given time to pose questions, a move that does not yield the floor.

The previous record was held by Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957, who spoke for 24 hours, 18 minutes to try to block civil rights legislation.

The symbolism of a Black senator surpassing Thurmond, a supporter of racial segregation, was noted by Booker and a number of his colleagues.

As he neared the record, Booker recalled late Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon who talked of stirring up “good trouble” to make an impact.

His voice still booming, Booker said, “We cannot act as if these were normal times.”

The moment was carried by MSNBC, but Booker’s marathon drew extensive attention across social media.