AI has already killed academia as we know it?

# Summary A tenured academic argues that AI has fundamentally broken academia's traditional merit system by making it possible to generate publishable research and student work at infinite volume. While sophisticated AI use goes undetected and produces high-quality output that earns better grades and publication acceptances than human-written work, unsophisticated users face detection and punishment, creating a system that rewards spending and AI optimization skills rather than genuine intellectual effort. The author contends that academia's entire engine—built on individual human productivity measured by grants, papers, and awards—no longer functions meaningfully when AI can produce comparable or superior work at scale.