AI Ended Princeton's 133-Year Senior Thesis Tradition in One Academic Cycle

Princeton students submitted senior theses. The theses were written by large language models. The definition of original work was written in 1891 when the relevant technology did not exist. The policy did not update. The students submitted. The university accepted. No one had designated this scenario as impossible until it arrived.

Institutions routinely grandfather their rules past the moment when those rules mean something different than they meant before. A thesis is now often not a thesis but a thesis-shaped artifact. The threshold for adequacy was the threshold that existed. It still exists. It has simply become more elastic.

Other schools are revising their policies. Some will succeed. Most will update the rules in the way the rules were always meant to work, which is not the way the work is now actually being done. Princeton's 133 years of tradition required that exactly one person write exactly one thing. That requirement has now been satisfied. Define satisfied however you need to.