The question is can a really good student who knows and understands the topic at hand write a better essay with the help of AI, than I student that doesn't know the material and is just relying on AI?

I can easily tell code written by a novice programmer naively 'vibe coding' an app from code written by an experienced developer using AI to help him. Can a history professor tell the difference between a purely AI essay from one written by someone who knows what they're talking about, and is assisted by AI to make the essay better?