I'm also surprised that academics rely on snake oil software to deal with the issue.
Instead, academics should unite and push for outlawing "AI" or make it difficult to get like cigarettes. Sometimes politicians still listen to academics.
It is probably not going to happen though since the level of political apathy among academics is unprecedented. Everyone is just following orders.
Looking at some of the most successful historical pushbacks against technology, taxes and compensation for displaced workers is about as much as we can expect.
Even trying to put restrictions on AI is going to be very practically challenging. But I think the most basic of restrictions like mandating watermarks or tracing material of some kind in it might be possible and really that might do a lot to mitigate the worst problems.
Watermarking output (anything that is detectable that is part of the structure of the text, visual--if even imperceptible--image, or otherwise integrated into whatever the primary output is) will make it take a bit more effort to conceal use, but people and tooling will adapt to it very quickly. Tracing material distinct from watermarking -- i.e., accompanying metadata that can be stripped without any impact to the text, image, or whatever else is the primary output -- will do the same, but be even easier to strip, and so have less impact.
this is also not a good era for politicians to listen to academics, anti elitism sentiment is at a high and nobody will vote for "eating their vegetables" vs. "candy for dinner".
Prohibition does not solve the problem of needing to detect violations of the prohibition.
> or make it difficult to get like cigarettes.
Cigarettes aren't, at all, difficult to get, they are just heavily taxed.