I'm not against the teaching of writing skills. I think it's currently done badly and I hope AI becomes such a problem that they change how it's done.

From high school up until I dropped out of college for the second time, scholarly writing was approached in a really stupid way: Assign a topic the student doesn't care about and have them "do a paper" on it. The boundary conditions of the paper are given in word, sentence, paragraph and/or page numbers. The alleged purpose for this exercise is to develop research skills; constructing arguments, supporting those arguments with vetted sources, drawing logical conclusions. In practice, the skills being built are padding with non-statements, use of MS Word's rich text features and paying for an MLA handbook. The teacher doesn't grade the paper based on the validity of sources or the quality of the arguments, it's graded on the correctness of grammar, punctuation, spelling and formatting. Because to actually grade student papers based on the merit of their ideas is a monumental task; you're asking a high school teacher to peer review 60 to 120 essays a month. So it doesn't happen; you get students throwing inappropriate sentences in the middle of essays to see if the professor notices and often they don't.

Have you ever heard the phrase "practice makes perfect?" It's referring to Thorndike's principle of exercise. A behavior is most strongly established through frequent stimulus and response. It's why actors rehearse and athletes practice. But! "Practice" requires a feedback mechanism to correct wayward behaviors, you need a director or coach to correct anything wrong. When I was in 7th grade, I was handed half a page of sheet music for all-county band tryouts and told to take it home and practice it. I had 14 months of trumpet playing experience at this point, I wasn't perfect at sight reading, so I took it home and learned to play it wrong. I showed up to the audition, confidently played a piece of music that only vaguely resembled what was on the page and did not make all-county band that year.

Of all the students currently in writing classes whose essays won't be graded or even read by their teachers...how many of them are learning how to research wrong?

I'm most of the way toward convinced that long essays are required specifically to be a massive opportunity cost for the students. The cult of academia reveres the shut-in scholar who eschews personal life in favor of work and research, so they force all students to cosplay as this arch-saint by assigning pointless tasks that look like what a scholar does. If AI can unceremoniously kill the entrenched ritual so that actual education can resume, so much the better.

What's the problem with using AI to write a research paper? The problem schools have with AI is it makes completing the assignment too fast and too easy. My problem is AI blatantly makes shit up, it's an outright bad tool.

I've got a better idea: decrease the importance of writing research papers from scratch, and start them out reviewing the research of others. Hand them a paper and have them follow up the sources and see if it's bullshit or not. Peer review is a massive part of science, right? So why don't they ever teach students to do it?