AI at "above average" is the best AI this series ever had, actually
I mean yes at "highly skilled" and above they're overly aggressive and straight up cheating, which sucks obviously because I used "highly skilled" or "pro" in all of the previous games so my first race was a huge disappointment, but after turning it down to above average I have to say I'm having lots of fun with AI races.
AI in previous games were just too clean, they rarely made any attempts to overtake, they never made any kind of mistake that would result in spinouts or crashes, AI races were pretty boring for me, but in this game (at "above averagel") it actually resembles what would happen in an online race with real people; mostly clean, few dumb mistakes here and there, some crash into eachother occasionally etc.
Like I'm geniunely having fun racing against AI in a forza game and I think the situation's not as bad as some people say, I'm scared playground might get the wrong memo and kill any kind of "humanity" this AI has and we're back to the same old boring AI.