Greetings! Let me re-phrase your question in a couple of different ways that may shed some light on things.
So, given the assumptions that
- there are many high-quality AI Go tools out there, and
- the main priority for online Go players is to increase their rankings by any means available (even if that means cheating)
the obvious question becomes, “Well, why isn’t everyone using AI assistance and cheating all the time?”
The surprising answer - as several people have already pointed out - is that it is not as much FUN as ranking up due to your own time, effort, and skill growth.
Now, do people cheat and use AI assistance on OGS? Yes, they sometimes do - and the OGS admins do an incredible job in identifying those situations and handing out consequences as appropriate.
However, in my opinion, this seems to be the exception rather than the norm, and the main reason is that rather than playing a game and learning from it, using an AI’s moves turns the active player into a passive transcriber - reduced to doing data entry without even necessarily understanding WHY the AI’s move was better than the moves they could come up with on their own. It turns out that - for most players the priority isn’t their abstract ranking - it’s their actual skill in being able to play the game, and the joy that comes from real growth and improvement.
As a counter-point, there have been many interesting threads on the OGS forum regarding different ways to use those AI Go programs as learning tools without resorting to cheating - ways that actually increase one’s skill and understanding of the game over time: