If the academic production of ChatGPT is indistinguishable from academic work by students and scholars, it is because academia has become a ChatBot factory.
Academic administrators can look forward to the days when ChatGPT writes papers for student and then grades them for their instructor. Without any academic readers or writers involved, the quality of academic work is almost guaranteed to improve.
Students are turning in papers written by AI and there are reasons to be concerned but they pale in comparison to the possible fact that faculty and scholars across the board might be doing it in equal proportions.
Given the intellectual anonymity of students in the lecture hall and the anodyne presence of faculty who have built academic careers on the condemnation of technical and disciplinary merits and who, more often than not, are not reading academic material at all, one can imagine that the magnitude of the problem is vast.