Library staff finding students using AI to rewrite borrowed sources

our librarian brought something to my attention last week that i hadnt thought about before. she’s been noticing students checking out the same handful of research books on canadian history and then a day or two later submitting essays that dont sound anything like the books but somehow hit all the same specific facts and even the same order of points. her theory is kids are photographing pages or typing in quotes from the book, then feeding it to an ai tool and asking it to rewrite in their own words. technically the ideas came from a real source, technically they read a real book, but the writing itself is fully ai generated based on borrowed material. it sits in a weird grey area for our policy which was written with copy paste plagiarism in mind, not this hybrid version. she wants to bring it to the next staff meeting but wanted other opinions first. is this plagiarism in your books, academic dishonesty of a different flavor, or just a new normal way research works now.