> copying off ai may annoy some people, but there is no law against it

There is no law against plagiarizing on assignments by copying off a real human either, what’s your point?

If AI generated an assignment paper for me, and I simply copypasted it and turned it in as my own, I don’t see it being materially different from the same being done with a paper written by another human (rather than AI).

> the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world

The purpose of each individual class is to teach students the skills that the class is supposed to teach. If the class in the OP was on proper usage of AI, that would be a different story, but it wasn’t.

Similarly, you wouldn’t write your own memory allocator in the real world, you would use an existing library for that. That doesn’t mean you will get away with just simply importing an existing memory allocator library in your assignment code and calling it a day.