I wonder if lack of consequences might be related to lack of proof. Cheating in the past looked like reusing an essay you found online or paying off someone to write it for you -- methods that offer a definitive way to prove it happened.
AI isn't particularly provable. Worse, a lot of professors are lazy and will rely on tools that tell them something was produced with AI; and like any tool, they'll produce false positives. Just imagine being expelled for writing because you don't make spelling mistakes, and do use em-dashes, bullet points and typographic emphasis.
Perhaps the only way to really to provide evidence against cheating accusations is to also provide a version history of the document the student worked on over time, plus notes (hand written preferably), and so on?
That would exponentially increase the workload of educators though, so it's unlikely to be taken up.
(I'm an instructor in a vocational field - students need to demonstrate their skills to achieve qualification, rather than write essays/reports/etc. - so AI isn't as a significant deal as it is in the academic fields.)
AI isn't particularly provable. Worse, a lot of professors are lazy and will rely on tools that tell them something was produced with AI; and like any tool, they'll produce false positives. Just imagine being expelled for writing because you don't make spelling mistakes, and do use em-dashes, bullet points and typographic emphasis.