General Discussion

It is what the instructor/school think - and, more important, what the guidelines say. The teachers and schools always set the rules, not the student.

Getting the right numerical answer is part of what is being tested in any math class - whether it is basic math skills or abstract algebra. Whether using a calculator is cheating depends on the instructor. As someone who taught math for 11 years (including basic math), and has a two degrees in math, I am qualified to assess that. When I started allowing the use of calculators in my basic math classes in the late 70s, many other math teachers forbid them. Then my students started significantly outperforming theirs on the standard test which all basic math students were required to pass - even when they had to take the class without using calculators. That is because the skills I taught them about process (which calculations were needed) and estimation freed them from the mechanics of arithmetic to learn the skills they needed to survive in real life. They used those skills on the exams to figure out when to use which functions - and to eliminate wrong answers because they were nowhere near the estimated answer - because they weren't struggling with arithmetic. (These were students who, for the most part, failed the 9th grade after passing every other grade without learning anything because the system I taught in could not fail a student without parental permission before 9th grade. They struggled with everything but the simplest arithmetic test - so we were working on basic skills like being able to calculate whether they were being paid what they were owed when they worked 35 hours for 8.75 an hour, or figuring out the unit price of items in the stores.)

Same for spelling. As a law instructor - grammar and spelling were always part of the grade, so spelling is always being tested - even at the graduate school level. No one is expected to turn off spellcheck before they complete their papers.

And as for creatives using AI - the fact that multiple options are generated makes it even a better analogy to calculators and spellchecking. The first (and repeated) step in art is ideation: the generation of lots of (in visual arts) rough sketches for a project - and then evaluating those images for composition, among other things. So generating multiple images is precisely what allow the artist to apply their creative eye to select those which are artistic from those which are garbage - in the same way they would from their own sketches. They are just creating sketches using a verbal description rather than their hands. This is analogous to the process of using a calculator to create a potential answer, then using estimation skills to ensure that it is not wildly inaccurate, or to the process of spellchecking in which multiple potential words are provided and the author must use their understanding of the intended meaning to choose the correct one.

While AI can be used without any thought (just as calculators and spellcheck can be), they are (all three) powerful tools which someone skilled in mathematics, writing, or art can use to aid their productivity.

(Again - I am not in favor of using AI which was trained on stolen works. That is a significant legal and moral issue - but a separate one from whether their are good uses for generative AI.)