Ars OpenForum

It's interesting to me that I pretty much agree with your point, but I constantly found myself wanting nitpick anyway. So first, validation: LLM's are a plague on learning and on the world, and are making education worse.

Now, specific commentary:

It doesn’t seem like anyone wants to listen to instructors explain how bad it feels to try to do our job in the presence of this annihilative education antimatter.

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Even in this essay where "instructors hate this" is your central thesis, it's hard to connect with you emotionally since the persuasive part is all about student learning. There isn't really an explicit argument that making instructors miserable is bad. I wish you had told us more clearly that we should care about teachers being miserable.

Should instructors preserve these sorts of assignments for students who want to benefit from them and accept the cheating, or should they eliminate the learning opportunity just to prevent cheating?

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Yes. This has always been the only good answer. It just requires change that instructors are not empowered to make, so you've been fighting a losing battle and slowly losing ground for decades. And of course, you point out the reason its a problem at all:

Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.

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Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We have culturally allowed grades to take on very outsized importance in people's lives and that has completely undermined their usefulness for learning. As far as I can see, getting back on track is going to require a cultural shift toward grades being a within-class metric of learning only, giving teachers substantially more power in their classrooms to make decisions without fear of challenges and consequences from students, parents, and administrators whose motives have little to no connection to learning.