My perspective here is viewing essays as a pedagogical tool - currently when we design a process (course/module/lecture/other content) for people to learn somet

My perspective here is viewing essays as a pedagogical tool - currently when we design a process (course/module/lecture/other content) for people to learn something, essays are one option that can be used when the intended activity is for the learner to study something and reflect on it for some time in order to achieve the desired learning outcome (and there's all kinds of pedagogical theory to judge when this is useful and when something else would be more effective instead). It's a means to an end, and that end is effective learning of something we've decided to be worth learning. In this case, the main point of an essay is effectively as a "proof of work" token, to use a cryptocurrency analogy - and just as with cryptocurrencies, if some shortcut is found that allows faking that "proof of work" then the whole process starts to become shaky. In this case we don't really want to abandon that core work done by the learner (since in some cases we have good reasons to prefer that particular type of work) but this rises a need to some alternative to essays that would achieve a similar result but not be as vulnerable to fakes. But regarding your initial point - IMHO if at some point we decide that people don't need to learn mental skills such as analysis of concepts because an AI can do all of that better, that certainly might be possible at some point, but at that point the whole notion of "why study stuff" disappears as well; I'd say that we stop needing to train people for that when we stop needing to train people, period; when the whole notion of studying any mental skill becomes as irrelevant as studying chess is now, and we can simply shut down higher education as such. And we (and our discussion) are not yet at this point, for now we still do care how to train people to do all of that.