When I was in school, I had the mindset that I wasn't going to discover new insights about very common historical events or writings. I was given a topic like "write a 50 page paper describing the impact of Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and rather than try for new insight, I searched the web and found a couple dozen sources. I copy pasted those sources and fragments into a giant word document. I then organized them into what would roughly make sense in terms of timeline and insights. Lastly, I went through and paraphrased every single sentence from start to finish and added in an introductory and conclusion/summary paragraph. The end result was 100% unique (as measured by computer plagiarism software) and netted me an A+. The professor was dumfounded as to how I came up with a 100% original 50 page paper on such a common topic.
Having ML write your paper is obviously cheating but isn't too far from what I did mentally. I think the valuable thing being lost is the ability to research a topic, quickly understand what's relevant, and structure the results.
In my mind, what you did was actually the goal of the paper. You researched the prevailing theories of the "impact of Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and summarized them in your own words. You probably have a much better understanding of the subject than if an AI did it for you though.
To be fair though, that sounds... mostly legit, what you did that is.
Ie in many cases in school i don't think they actually care to teach you the subject. What good is that subject really going to have on your life going forward? Even if the sense of ethics or history-repeating i suspect it's quite low.
What those meaningless tasks can do (though highly dependent on the person, i assume) is teach you how to research, how to communicate, and how to cite.
At least that was always my takeaway from many subjects in school that were subjective (ie not math, science, etc). The content is often the least important aspect of many early learnings. .. but then again i loathed school growing up, so who am i to speak on the subject lol.
Having ML write your paper is obviously cheating but isn't too far from what I did mentally. I think the valuable thing being lost is the ability to research a topic, quickly understand what's relevant, and structure the results.