More than ever before, colleges want not just an “authentic” applicant but an authenticated one.
Page B2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 2 September 2026
Trust in authorship is dying: colleges doubt your essay, artists sue over their stolen voice.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY. The presumption of authorship — the working assumption, held for as long as anyone alive can remember, that the person whose name sat atop an essay or a song had, in fact, made the thing — died this week. It was old enough that nobody thought to check its age. It is survived by a great deal of paperwork.
Born sometime before anyone bothered writing it down, the presumption served two institutions faithfully for generations: the college admissions office, which took your essay at your word, and the record industry, which took your melody at your word. It asked for very little in return. Trust, mostly, and the occasional benefit of the doubt.…
…(cont) It began to fail this year in colleges first. Admissions officers, per this week's reporting, no longer trust that the application in front of them was written by the applicant rather than assembled by a large language model, and grade inflation upstream hasn't helped them sort out who's telling the truth. The essay, once a decent proxy for a seventeen-year-old's mind, became a coin flip.
It failed a second time in music. Jason Isbell and a group of fellow artists filed suit against Suno, an AI company accused of generating music built on their work without so much as a byline, let alone a check. If the presumption of authorship were still alive, that would have been a contract negotiation. Instead it was a lawsuit, because there was no longer a shared assumption to negotiate from.
A related notion — the idea that meritocracy itself measures anything real once a machine can produce the application and, apparently, the song — is now in critical condition and not expected to recover soon, according to this week's commentary.
Preceded in death by: the take-home essay, the benefit of the doubt, several assumptions about who actually wrote your kid's personal statement.
Survived by: two lawsuits, one admissions office running background checks on grammar, and a great deal of malarkey about what a machine can and cannot be credited with.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that any institution still capable of verifying authorship — a school, a court, a copyright office — actually do it, before there's nothing left to check.
“You used to be able to submit an essay or write a song and it belonged to you, full stop. Now the college doesn't believe you wrote it and the label doesn't believe you own it, which means the only thing everybody's agreed is authentic is the tuition bill and the AI subscription that produced the confusion in the first place.”
“Nobody's killing anything, colleges are simply adapting their review process for a new tool, and Suno is a platform, not a thief — well, 'platform' might be doing some work there, let's move on.”
The receipts
The continued development of artificial intelligence could have far-reaching social and economic implications. Matt Bruenig shares his thoughts on three issues where AI may radically change our behavior and self-understanding.
Jason Isbell, Guy Forsyth and other musicians filed a class action lawsuit against Suno, claiming the AI platform used their music to train its model without permission. Jo Ling Kent has more.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.