Cheater, Cheater, Microchip Eater!

A still night. Katydid chirps muffle through thick window panes. You’re reading heavy lines in a heavier text. The analog clock steadily ticks. Early hours. Blurred sight, throbbing head. The stale cold coffee in the withered Starbucks cup no longer invigorates. Someone snores far off, in another threadbare carrel.

It’s early May. You turn over another foxed page in A People’s History of the United States. The Politics 201 term paper is due in less than six hours. But you’re only halfway through distilling Zinn’s tall-poppy theories into a convincing précis. You’ve yet to crack The Imperial Presidency. The clock’s minute hand marches steadily toward the deadline. Damn that Delta Beta Psi mixer! To hell with that formaldehyde-tasting jungle juice! Woe your fading faculties! And you must surely forget nudging your dismal 2.3 average up to a mother-mollifying 2.8.

Dire such a portrait may be—or, for those of little impulse control, a cruel remembrance—such a state is morally superior to the alternative. And, no I’m not talking about the summa cum laude overachiever who can nail a 4.0 in advanced calculus but whose mind blanks when asked how many bottles it takes to play Edward Forty Hands.

In “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” James Walsh performs the core function of journalism: he tattles on a bunch of brats. Walsh unfolds his New York reportage by quoting Columbia University student Chungin Lee, who admits to prodding ChatGPT—the popular AI bosom companion—into producing 80 percent of his class assignments. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee divulges. He went on to shamelessly deride modern-day coursework: “Most assignments in college are not relevant. They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” From the mouth of Pell-Granted babes!

That kind of brash coolness, emblematic of a young man convinced his grip on the world is firm, is undercut by that antiquated moral cicerone: conscience. Lee believes the stigma on leaning on a wired-cognitive crutch is fading: “I think we are years—or months, probably—away from a world where nobody thinks using [AI] for homework is considered cheating.” [Italics mine.]

Ah, that little c-word—a prick in a chancer’s overconfidence. In all his rationalization of “hacking” his way to a degree, Lee can’t help but default to terms of deception when describing his ploy. He can’t elude the Wittgensteinian imperative: he speaks in ethical dichotomies, of honor and humbug, of on the square and on the make, of right and wrong.

Professors, too, are fatalistic about the prospect of grading endless synthezoid-slop dissertations. There’s a shared uncanny valley among educators that “students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.”

Somewhere, in that expressed worry, a sharp critic can detect a deeper concern for the preceptor profession: if any student can utilize an LLM program to consolidate centuries of thought into a report, what’s even the point of a classroom? And worse, without any utility, how’s a thrice-degreed prof supposed to achieve tenure or a pension?

(My international-relations professor once treated me to lunch my senior year, with the imploration that I pursue a career in higher education. Guess I was right to bin his advice!)

The total annihilation of the university paradigm is not unknown to the AI obelisk. Back in 2022, Washington and Lee University professor Jeff Schatten challenged GPT-3, an outmoded AI engine from which ChatGPT is derived, to recognize if it was “threatening the integrity of college essays.” The answer was not dissimilar to John Connor asking the T-800 how the Terminators conquered Earth. The neural-chip dutifully acknowledged its power over the livelihoods of millions of aspiring adjunct instructors: “If anyone can produce a high-quality essay using an [AI] system then what’s the point of spending four years (and often a lot of money) getting a degree? College degrees would become little more than pieces of paper if they can be easily replicated by machines.”

It’s at this point that the presidents of every Ivy League university should pool their endowments into purchasing an H bomb, either from the DOE, or a black market fencer like Russia, and launch it straight into the heart of Silicon Valley. How badly do they want to save such repositories of sacred knowledge like “Nature of Society: Beyoncé and Intersectionality” and “Introduction to World Puppetry”? Young minds are on the line!

Artificial general intelligence approximating the collate-condense-and-churn process is inevitable at this point. As AI-advocates frequently point out, we’re too far gone down the petabyte pike. Abstract cognitive work—laptop occupations like spreadsheet jotter and PowerPoint composer—will soon go the way of the Linotype operator, the paddy roller, and being David Hogg.

The only defense against this trend is a small weapon that, if wielded correctly, could be effective.

Yes, the AI revolution isn’t just here, but is being streamed 24/7 on your smartphone. And yes, clever-clog students like Chungin Lee can’t be prevented from enlisting the latest chatbot to custom-code his classwork. And yes again, today’s children may have an easier time fraternizing with a cloud-based nonbeing than making friends in the flesh.

But all of that kind of reliance on advanced hardware is done by one type of person: a cheating loser. The “artificial” in AI will always apply to anyone who opts for inhuman networks over his or her own mentation. It’s con-artistry and should be shamed as such. Fortune shouldn’t just favor the prepared mind, but the mind whose synapses don’t lazily rest on quantum chips.

“Work! What is it but death to souls eager for pleasure,” cried Lucien de Rubempré when tussling between a life of voluptuary excess and a vocation of hard, unstinting effort. Today’s college students are convinced more Miller-Lite-soaked nights are the better living promised by technology. But how quickly they have their confidence gutted, their esteemed excavated, once the cheat machine is foiled. A New York University professor managed to hack the hackers, AI-proofing his assignments. His students immediately mewled, cried foul, and demanded a dispensation for their techified “learning styles.”

In the spare word of one pedagogue: pathetic. Such childish protest must be met with ridicule over and over and over and over and over again, until the tears and complaints harden into resolve.