If AI can do your classwork, why go to college? | The Gray Area

Hey, I'm Sean, host of The Gray Area. For the show this week, I talked to James Walsh. He's a features writer at New York Magazine. We discuss his latest piece about how everyone is using AI to cheat their way through college and how that threatens the entire academic project. I hope you enjoy. James Walsh, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm glad you're here. Uh, I love this piece and I'm really excited to talk to you about it. it uh it resonated with me on a few different levels which I'm sure we will get to. Um I'll just start. I mean I it doesn't seem like AI is your your beat as it were. Um so how did you get drawn into the wonderful world of AI cheating? My editor and I were having a conversation about cheating and not AI. Uh, and so I started doing these interviews and kind of uh realized that there was no way to write a cheating story without it being about AI. Uh, and and not only that, it was like, oh, everybody I'm talking to is in some way cheating, even if they're they don't think it's cheating. Um, it's just everywhere and it's like bending the the very definition of cheating. I mean, is there any other way people are cheating these days? It's not like people are taking are people taking Scantron still and like looking over shoulders and bubbling in Yeah. I talked to students who were like, "Oh, the kind of old school cheating, you know, the trade craft is still there. There's still, you know, whether it's people using Apple Watches to pull up PDFs or, you know, scribbling something on the the palm of their hands." As one student said to me, it's like, you know, the floor of cheating is is is still there. It's just that like the ceiling's been blown off. I'm both um elated and and bummed that I missed the golden age. I I would go back and forth like Yeah, I I use Spark Notes of course I used, you know, every once in a while I pee in Spark Notes. I'm I'm actually very glad that I didn't have this tool when I was in college. Yeah, I am too ultimately and we will also get to that I'm sure. Um, one thing that really made the piece work is how candid everyone you spoke to was, especially the students, and I know it's hard to get people to talk on the record about something they're not supposed to be doing. How did you go about finding these students? And why do you think they were so open? Uh, the reporting process for finding these students was sort of like um, you know, any kind of story. It's I'll find I'll talk to anybody. Um so I would find them through student newspapers was a big one. Uh whether they were mentioned in a story or a few of them had written opeds. So those students were of course eager to talk about AI even on the record because they had written um op-eds. In fact, one memorable interview was a student as a freshman. She had written kind of an optimistic AI oped saying we need to incorporate AI more in the classroom to teach students how to use this for the rest of their lives. And then I talked to her uh you know as a sophomore uh sometime in the past few months and the first thing she said she's like I have done a 180. We need to get AI out of the classroom. And that was just kind of indicative of like how many more students over just the past two semesters are are using it. Um and then I you know another kind of notable uh one where I would I reached out to a lot of students who were having these conversations already on on Reddit and Discord. And um one student in Canada uh she went on to her school's uh uh what you know thread on on Reddit and and said, "I have a problem. Do you guys have any advice for how to like kick a chat GBT addiction because I am fully addicted?" And it was a really earnest kind of request. Uh and so I reached out to her and she was like, "Yeah, let's let's talk." Um and and then of course just you know ask one student can lead to another student and and and just kind of um trying to to speak with every sort of student I could find. Um well let's walk through the tools that students are using because I I still think there are a lot of people who just aren't familiar with any of this have not yet dipped their toes into the wonderful world of LLMs and chat bots. Um what are the main platforms? Are we talking about you know chat GPT clog copilot Gemini and how are students using them to cheat? Sure. I mean the vast majority of students I talked to were using chat GBT open AI's platform and so much so that sometimes they would even refer to chat GBT and then I'd go back to them and you know maybe they were using another platform but chat GPT was just kind of shorthand for a chatbot or AI but of course uh students talked about using um Claude yeah uh Anthropox and Gemini Google and and Copilot um uh and they were using it uh for kind of every facet of their education really. Um you know I I think it's my bias as you know an an English major and uh a writer where I was really interested in hearing how they were using it um to to write their essays or or outline their essays or generate ideas for their essays. Um uh but students were also eager to talk about you know uh how they used it to take notes during class for them uh or summarize textbooks or create study guides and outlines. Um and then you know one of the biggest use cases is just computer science students who are using it to code. Um some science students using it you know to analyze data. Um but the the computer science students using it to code is just a huge um use case that's and I spoke with a a professor a computer science professor at Berkeley you know one of the the top computer science schools in the country who said you know his students have a a serious problem. um tons of his students are are using it on their take-home assignments and then when they're uh tested on the same sorts of problems uh in class they're failing. They realize that if they're using the chat bots to code that they actually won't be needed as coders. Exactly. That's exactly what this professor told them. you know if you are depending on AI now you are just training yourself to be an assistant I think he put it you know the way he put it was an assistant to an AI platform and and you are going to be the most replaceable uh person in the workforce and he said that you know he has had conversations with executives at uh these these tech companies who ask him why why would I hire a coder now anyway and we see that in in the workforce right I think Microsoft just laid off a ton of coders. Do they feel that when they're told that, hey, look, you're you're you're making yourself that much more replaceable. Is that something they they really feel in their bones or people are just just kind of rolling with it? You know, that's a good that's a really good question. I I I will say, you know, certainly um a a good percentage of the students I spoke to um have concerns and um are aware to some extent of uh what they're doing uh as they rely more and more on AI. I think there's maybe kind of a whiplash going on here in a sense that like they're entering school at a time when like what what can I study now that is going to get me a job later? What skills will be necessary in four years? this stuff is moving so quickly that like it's I might as well offload this this learning or or or you know I might as well not work hard at acquiring these skills because who knows if four years from now they're going to help me. I and that's a I understand that that kind of uh that fear. So what's the simplest example of the process here of of how people are using it? I mean, is it as simple as you go in there and you say, "Hey, uh, I'm reading such and such book. Uh, you know, I'm going to upload a PDF of of said book. Here's my essay prompt. Give it to me." I mean, is it is it pretty much that straightforward? Yes. I mean, it depends on kind of um uh the type of student, the type of class, the type of school you're going to. You know, whether or not a student thinks they can get away with that is something or whether or not a student can get away with that is something is a different question. But there are plenty of students who are taking their prompt from their professor, copying and pasting it into chatbt and saying, "I need a four to five page essay." uh and copy and pasting that essay without ever reading it. One of the funniest examples I came across is a number of professors are using this so-called Trojan horse method where they're um dropping in kind of these nonsecuadors into their prompts. um mention broccoli, broccoli, mention dualipa, say something about Finland into their prompts so that uh you know if you were to just copy and paste the prompt into Chachi BT the essay that it spits out will say something about broccoli or do a students who are just blindly copy and pasting those essays and handing them in. So not only you know are they not uh writing their papers, they're not even reading them. Well, it seems like with just a little bit of effort, you could cover that up. I mean, unless you're just so lazy that you you just insert the prompt and just copy and paste whatever you get back. But if you just take a little bit of time to comb through it, you should be able to cut that stuff out and cover up the trail. and and every professor I spoke to said, you know, so many of my students are using AI and I know that so many more students are using it and I have no idea because it can essentially write, you know, 70% of your essay for you. And if you do that other 30% cover to your tracks and kind of make it your own, you know, it can it can write you a pretty good essay. A and you know there are these platforms these AI detectors that you know there's a big debate about how effective they are you know and they essentially uh will scan an essay and say you know there assign some grade 70% chance that this is AI generated and and that's really just looking at the language and and deciding whether or not lang that language is created by an LLM or an algorithm and And you know it doesn't account for big ideas. It doesn't you know catch the students who are using AI and saying what should I write this essay about and not doing the actual thinking themselves and then just just kind of writing you know it's sort of like paint by numbers at that point. Well it reduces everyone to editors right? You're just you're just going in there and manipulating the language that the machine gives you. In fact, I had a conversation with uh you know the University of Florida is has been um eager to adopt a lot of schools have but University of Florida in particular um the administration's eager to adopt AI and I had conversation with um a an administrator very high up there who said to me you know what does your writer what does the future of writing look like? It probably looks a lot more like editing and and he admitted that. Did you find that students are relating very differently to all of this to these changes? What was the general vibe you got? I think yeah, it it was a pretty wide perspective um on AI. There were students uh you know who I spoke to a student at the University of Wisconsin who said you know I realized AI was a problem when I would walk in started last fall walking into the library and fully you know at least half of the students were using chatbt and it was at that moment that she sort of started thinking about her classroom discuss discussions. Yeah. and and some of the peerreviewed essays um she was reading and students were you know the one example she gave that really stuck with me uh was uh she was taking some psych class and they were talking about attachment theories and she was like attachment theory is something that we should all be able to talk about our own personal experiences we all have our own attachment theory we can talk about you know our relationships with our parents that should be a great class discussion and yet I'm sitting here in class and people are referencing studies that we haven't even covered in class and it just makes for a really boring and unfulfilling class and it was like that realization for her was like oh we have to put the brakes on here something is wrong um so I you know there are students like that and then there are students who uh sort of feel like they have to use AI because if they're not using AI you know they're at a disadvantage um and not only that AI is going to be around no matter or what for the rest of their lives. So they feel as if they're the college to some extent now is about you know training them to use AI. Um and and then there are the students who it's like why not? It's something at our disposal and um you know we go to school to learn how to be efficient and you know this is sort of uh as one student put it you know a hackable assignment so I might as well use it to hack. And there's this guy uh Roy Lee who's an interesting character, sort of the protagonist of the piece in in some ways. Um and he has this interesting path from community college to Colombia to startup founder. What did you make of him and his story? Sure. Roy um Roy is somebody who just has always know known he wants to be a founder and he's been laser focused on that and and so uh you know he he told me about going to Colombia and using AI to cruise his way through every assignment. He just did not care about the assignments. because um he had such a winding road to Colombia, I had to stop him and say like why would you go through so so much effort, you know, he took a gap year and then did a year at community college to get into uh an elite school like Colombia and then just not take advantage of it at all and and not do the work. And he said, "I'm here to find a co-founder and a wife." Um, and I I think he was really um helpful um because it's not just about his approach to AI. It's just about his mindset and his idea of college being this transactional place that you know um gets you something very specific um and is kind of this stepping stone. I thought that was really kind of it does kind of give the game away a little bit, right? I mean going to college it's you know get out of here with this business about, you know, learning. Uh it's just it's a networking activity, right? And and and honestly, you know, as kind of funny or maximalist as his language or like this example is, there's truth to it. You know, college, we can get into this is just, you know, the idea of college as this place Yeah. where you just go to to to grow intellectually is is long gone. Yeah. No, I look I I it makes me a little sad, but I respect the game. I respect the honesty. Sure. Sure. Um, yeah. I mean, was that a pretty common perspective among students, especially at the more elite universities? I wouldn't say it was common with the students I spoke to, but those students often sort of talkedly I think about other students who had that perspective in um certain majors and in kind of their they would talk about their classmates in in finance and and some in computer science who really felt like you know they were there for for uh for networking. Well, Wendy was a different case, right? So she is or she says she's against cheating. She's against copying and pasting, but of course she's using Jad GBT. What was the story she was telling herself to to justify that? Or if that's the wrong word, what was her explanation? I think Wendy um was sort of the best example uh kind of spoke to a lot of students experiences um where you know she understands the honor code as it's written um and and she views cheating now as anyone who copies and pastes from chat GPD into their their Google docu and then and then turns it in. and she, you know, like I was saying earlier, somebody who uses chat GPT to formulate ideas to um come up with topic sentences and then does that kind of paint by numbers essay sits down, you know, and writes an essay in two hours that would normally take somebody six, seven, eight hours. So, it's it's kind of hacking. And she in my conversation with her, I just sort of realized I think the best part about this assignment was watching students in real time kind of decide where the line is on cheating. and she hadn't really figured it out, you know, where um she was nostalgic for the act of actually writing um but felt as if she wasn't cheating by outsourcing um the deep thinking that essays are are meant to provoke uh you know outsourcing that to an AI. Did she just didn't feel like it it was cheating at all? I'm not sure anyone knows where is the line between using AI to assist and using AI to cheat. I mean, I'm very sympathetic especially to to her case, right? I mean, she's clearly someone who would rather live in a different world, but this is the world we got and in this world for all the reasons we've already said, this is the game and people around you are playing it and if you're not, then you're going to be at a disadvantage. And also just setting that aside, it's just incredibly tempting. I mean, I can't how do you I mean, how do you not? It's right there at your fingertips. You could just you could be done in 30 minutes and hit the club, you know, or go to the ball game or whatever. You know, it's it's asking a lot. It's it's asking a lot of of students to to not partake. It is. and and um you know I I am somebody personally who like when Chad GBT you know the the the version as we know it in November 2022 came out you know shortly after was the first time I really played around with it I was like ah it's a party trick um and I think in the course of reporting the story I played with it a lot more to you know familiarize myself with it and it was like the first time I realized oh if I you know had two paragraphs and needed a transition and I couldn't come up with a you know like it could offer me something and I am you know much older than these students and there was a immediate realization of like if I start doing this now I am going to lose something like there some part of my brain is not going to um to to flex and and and work and that is really sc that's scary to me and it's enough of a deterrent that like I just don't want to do that um and to ask to put that sort of like um ask on 18y olds, 19 year olds, 20-year-olds is crazy to me because like like you said, you know, they they have clubs to to be at or um they have uh you know, as one student put sometimes an essay just needs to get read or something, you know. Yeah. Touche. Yeah. Um, I'm just curious. Did you Did any of uh Wendy or anyone else share some of their essays with you? Did you get a chance to look at it? Were they good? Were they convincing? Would they have fooled you? The Wendy moment was like the crazy moment for me was, you know, after our conversation, I asked her to send me the essay she had written uh uh that she talked about and I opened the essay and it was about critical pedagogy. this um you know uh this theory you know uh Paulo Fer the the Brazilian thinker on on learning methods. Um and I went back to her and said you know you kind of you have to see the irony in using AI to write about critical pedagogy. And and she she really um first like just I think quickly flipped it on me. She's like what what do you think? And and I said, "No, I mean, you explain this to me." And I think, you know, um she had lines in the essay about, you know, learning is what makes us human. Um and and so I I asked her again about it and she said, you know, something about like I do think use depending on AI, you know, you're going to lose some critical thinking, but you know, it's there. You know, AI is is always going to be there for us, so we might as well be using it. Is there a case to be made, a depressing case, but true, that students who are good at using AI, and I think you alluded to this earlier, will be more prepared actually for the future that, you know, prompt engineering is just going to be the new writing and better to figure that out now so you can adapt. I don't know. I can't really speak at all to the nuances of that in computer science or in sciences. and you know what you have to learn in order to get AI to do what you want. I I just can't speak to it. But um in terms of essay writing, I it's just kind of intuitive, I think. And I I don't know necessarily what you're learning by copying and pasting a prompt um into chatbt. I mean, any like, you know, anybody can do that. So, I I I don't really understand when people talk about like teaching students to use AI in in the arts or humanities. I I I still don't really know what that looks like. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business is all about turning your ideas into reality. And to see it through, you need the right tools. Tools like Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And they say 10% of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gym Shark to brands just getting started like Dr. Shaun Illings Drillings and Fillings and the Gray Area Soul Patch die for hip cats who want to look as young as they feel. Shopify's design studio lets you build a big beautiful online store that matches your brand style. You can also use their AI tools to step up your content creation. Plus, you can easily create email and social media campaigns to meet your customers wherever they are. If you're ready to sell, you can be ready for Shopify. You can turn your big business idea into reality with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today at shopify.com/vox. Go to shopify.com/vox. Shopify.com/vox. Let's talk about the professor perspective. I mean the professors you spoke to all seem to share something pretty close to despair. Yes. Those are primarily the professors in writing heavy classes or computer science classes. You know there were professors um who I spoke to who actually were really you know bullish on on AI. Um I spoke to one professor doesn't appear in the piece um but she uh is at UCLA and she um teaches I believe comparative literature and used AI to create uh her textbook her entire textbook um for this class uh this this semester and she says it's the be best class she's ever had. Uh and so I think there are some people who are optimistic She was an outlier in terms of the professors I spoke to. Um, for the most part, professors were, yes, in despair. Uh, they don't know how to police uh AI usage and even when they know an essay is AI generated, um, the recourse there is is is really thorny. Um, if you're going to accuse a student of using AI, there's no real good way to prove it. And students know this, right? Um, so they can always deny, deny, deny. And just the sheer volume of AI generated essays or paragraphs um is overwhelming. So um that just on the surface level is extremely frustrating um and has a lot of professors down. Now, if we kind of zoom out and just think also kind of about education um in general, you know, this just raises a lot of really uncomfortable questions for teachers and administrators about the value of each assignment and extrapolate that out, you know, not just the evaluated assign assignment but the value of degree of the degree in education in general. Yeah. Yeah, I mean look, I I was a professor very briefly. Um, and it is very easy to to spot when someone hasn't authored their own work. I mean, you you can you can kind of tell, but knowing and proving are very different things like you were saying and and I can imagine a lot of faculty just deciding, you know what, it's not worth the hassle of making these sorts of allegations. It's not worth it. Um, which again I I understand, but I think the end result of that is that everyone involved sort of ceases to take any of it seriously and the whole thing just becomes completely hollowed out. Yeah. I I don't I somehow don't think we're going to police our way out of this problem. you know, one also just like asking professors to like do this CSI sort of thing and then go to the for every AI generated essay is just not sustainable. Um, so you know what professors, you know, and administrators are kind of talking about is one upfront getting students the most important thing for them to learn at this point is like why they shouldn't be using um AI and and convincing them not to use AI. You know, cheating in general is the kind of research on it shows that cheating comes, you know, from a lot of different factors that we kind of all understand. you cut corners when you're you know stressed or um or or you know short on time you know there all these external factors um and I think uh if if we can really get students to understand what they're losing by cheating that's like the number one kind of method of of making sure they don't use AI from there like there's the practical stuff like going back to blue books um going you know I talked to one professor who's gone switched entire entirely from essays to oral exams. And he really enjoys it. He sits down. I mean, he's lucky in that he's got small enough class sizes that he has time to do this. Um, but he has really enjoyed having this one-on-one time with students and getting to ask them questions uh and hearing their responses and it's a better way for them to show them the mastery of the topic. But he also admits that there's something lost. What does he think is lost? Well, just the ability to write, right? Like I there are plenty of students who are going to do a better job writing and sitting and thinking than than you know sitting down with a professor and fumbling through a conversation like that that that sucks for for those students that you know that would have sucked for me in college. Um uh so there there is something that's lost. Um, so I I I I think there's got to be some sort of um ad hoc way that can, you know, be a combination of blue books, orals, and getting students to really understand um the value of doing their own work. I got to go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago. um the professor who thinks it's a good thing that she was able to use AI to write her textbook. You can't really ask students to not use AI to do their assignments if you're using AI to produce your lectures or write your textbooks or or do your lesson planning. Right? A lot of professors and I understand why are also telling their students it's okay to use AI as long as they site their work or you know um in some cases they'll ask for a print out of the conversation uh between the student and the AI just as a way to like kind of show the thinking. How many professors do you think now are just having AI write all their lectures? I I don't know how many are. I know that um there are a lot of platforms that um are uh advertising themselves or you know asking professors to use them more not just to write lectures but to even grade papers which of course you know as I say in the piece opens up the very real possibility that right now an AI is grading itself and offering comments on an essay that it wrote you know like and this is pretty widespread stuff uh you know Microsoft has has given this platform to like all the students in the Sao Paulo, you know, um, high school network, you know, and there are plenty of universities um across the country using um offering teachers uh this this technology and and so and you know, students love to talk about catching their their professors using AI. I mean, it's I bet it brings a lot of joy. I know another professor you spoke to just said, "Look, every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up. Retirement, you know, that's pretty bleak." Was that a a pretty common level of demoralization in your reporting? I spoke to another couple professors who are like, you know, I'm nearing retirement, so it's not my problem. Um, and good luck figuring it out, younger generation. Um, cool. Yeah, I mean it is I I just don't think um people outside of academia realize what a seismic um change um is coming and it's it's um and it's in many ways a canary, right? This is something that we're all going to have to deal with professionally. Um and it's happening much much faster than anyone anticipated. I spoke with somebody who works on education at Anthropic who said, you know, we expected students to um be early adopters and use it a lot. We did not realize how many students would be using it and how often they would be using it. I want to go back to the administrators. Is it your sense that a lot of university administrators are incentivized to not look at this too closely that it's better for business to shove it aside? I mean I I want to give administrators more credit than that. I I You don't. But you I mean I guess you you have a lot more experience in academia than I do. So, um I you know I'll take your word for it. I mean I you know I do think there is a um vein of um AI optimism among a certain you know type of person of a certain generation who um is you know saw saw the tech boom and thought like I missed out on that wave and now I kind of want to adopt you know I want to be part of this new wave this future for this inevitable future that's coming. So, they they want to adopt the technology and aren't really picking up on how dangerous it might be. I still know a lot of people who teach at universities and I talk to them all the time and and a lot of them tell me that they feel very much on their own with this that the administrators are are pretty much just hey figure it out. And I think it's revealing that university admins were very quickly able to say during COVID implement drastic institutional changes um to respond to that, but they're much more content to let the whole AI thing play out. And just so that's clear what I'm saying uh and it's this is me saying this, this is my opinion. Um, I think that they were super responsive to COVID because it was a threat to the bottom line. They needed to keep the operation running. AI on the on the other hand doesn't threaten the bottom line in that way or at least it doesn't yet. But AI is a massive potentially extinction level threat to the very idea of higher education. But they seem more comfortable with a degraded education as long as the tuition checks are still cashing. You think I'm being too harsh? No, I want No, no, I I genuinely don't think that's too harsh. I I think there um maybe a factor there is um not much of an appreciation among administrators for the power of AI and exactly what's happening in the classroom and how prevalent it is. I mean but you you are right. Um I did speak with many professors who go to administrators or even just older teachers you know TAs going to professors and saying this is a problem. Um as I spoke to to one teacher one TA at a writing course at Iowa um who went to his professor and the professor said just grade it like it was any other paper. You know it's sort of like turn a blind eye to it. Um, and that is one of the ways AI is, you know, challenging kind of like exposing the rot underneath education. Like it's just this this system that hasn't been updated in forever. And um, and in the case of kind of the US's educational higher ed higher ed, it's like, yeah, for a long time it's been this transactional experience. Um, you pay X amount of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, and you get your degree. and what happens in between is not as important. And look, even if what you said a minute ago is true, right, that maybe a lot of the administrators don't fully appreciate the power of these tools, that's not really an excuse, right? I mean, that's that's the result of a decision not to understand. And that to me is is just as obscene. Sure. And many of these universities do have partnerships with right AI and and what you said about um universities can also be said about AI that you know um for the most part these are companies or companies within nonprofits that are trying to get capture customers. one of this kind of more dystopian moments. You know, we were finishing this story, getting ready to just completely close it, and I got a push alert that was like, "Google is letting parents know that they, you know, have created a chatbot for children under 8 years old or 10 years old or something." Um, and and it was kind of a disturbing experience, but they are trying to capture these younger um customers and and build this loyalty. You know, there's been reporting from the Wall Street Journal on um Open AI and how they have been sitting on an AI detector that would be really really effective. Um essentially watermarking uh their output uh and they've been sitting on it. They have not released it. Wow. Wonder why. Yeah. You have to wonder and you know, you have to imagine they know that students are using it. And in terms of building loyalty, you know, an AI director might not be the best thing for the brand. You know, I if you don't mind, I I just want to ask you about some of this on a more personal level. I mean, as someone who is in the business of thinking publicly or writing publicly, if these tools existed when you were in college, do you think you would have used them? And if you did, do you think you would have become a writer at all? Could you have become a writer if you didn't actually, you know, write? I mean, I I don't I would do to this day, you know, I'm 39 and I will do anything other than write when I have to write. Like, I'll do my taxes. I will eat a bag of nails. Like, I hate writing. I hate it's just and I am a professional writer. Um so uh this tool in 18 in the hands of 18-year-old me, you know, I I I would have used it. That being said, you know, I feel really good when I write now and um the idea of stringing together words and ideas is um uh is really important to me and makes me feel good about myself. And so, um, that, you know, professors I spoke to, and I'm thinking of one TA in particular who said the thing that he was most worried about is students taking the easy way out. Um, that they didn't sit down and struggle. And you know, the idea of getting from a a blank blinking cursor to one page, even if that student's not going to go on to be a writer, um is really important for um their sense of self and um and their ability to to think in complex critical ways and and and that to lose that is really scary. Um, and no, I certainly, you know, I I doubt I would be who I am and and do what I do. Look, I mean, I I will not judge any student who's doing this because I'm I'm fairly certain I would have too if I had the option. However, um I think it's really important that we not separate thinking and writing because in so many ways writing is thinking right and and for me at least it's very often I don't even know what I think until I write right and to the extent I think well now as an adult which is super debatable but it is because I spent years in school sitting with these books, reading these books, thinking about these books. They changed me. They inspired me. They set me on the course that I'm on. And if Chad GPT was doing the work for me, that would not have happened. Mhm. I don't think it I don't think it's even conceivable that it would have happened. I'd be a different person doing something different. I don't know what that would be, but I'd be a different person. And uh yeah, that that's what that is what's so dispiriting to me about all of this. All right, now I'm sermonizing. So I'll stop. Well, no, I mean the the thing that a lot of the sort of defense that a lot of AI optimists put up is like it's that it's a calculator or you know you you know I grew up with spellch check and other generations before me didn't have that. Um, and just fundamentally I say to these people like, "Do you not understand the difference between like a little green line, squiggly line between like after a dangling modifier and like something that's generating ideas and summarizing the books that you were supposed to have spent the past two weeks reading like of course there's a difference. We're a long way from spellch check. Yes. All right. You mentioned the calculator, right? I mean, I which is a good time for me to ask the obligatory um are we sure we're not old people yelling at clouds here question, right? People did panic about calculators. People panicked about the internet. Hell, Socrates panicked about the written word. Mhm. Um how do we know this isn't just another moral panic? One that might look silly in retrospect. To be clear, this is my opinion. I I genuinely I don't know if it's the case. I think there's a lot of different ways we could respond to that. Um, it's not a generational moral panic. This is a tool that's available and it's going it's available to us just as it's available to students. Society and our culture will decide what you know the morals are and it's and that is changing and the way that the definition of cheating is changing. So, so who knows it might be a moral panic today and it won't be in a year. Um uh however, you know, somebody like Sam Alman, you know, the CEO of OpenAI is one of the people who said this is um this is a calculator for for words. And I just don't really understand how that um is compatible with other statements he's made about AI, you know, potentially being lights out for humanity or um uh statements made made by people at an anthropic um about the power of AI to potentially be a catastrophic event for humans. So um and these are the people who are closest and and thinking about it the most of course. Um I I I I have spoken to some people who say you know there is a possibility and um I think there are people who use AI who would back this up that you know we've kind of maxed out the AI's potential to to supplement essays or writing that it might you know not get much better than it is now you know and I think that would be like a very long shot and one that I would not want to bank on. No. Um, but this is the worst it will ever be. Yeah. Yeah. And if that were the case, then we would look back, I think, on this conversation and be like, "Yeah, we were just kind of old people shouting at the clouds." Just a calculator for words. That is nauseating. That like that that hurts me in my heart, James. And it's I think it's more likely I don't know this idea of I'm interested in this idea of like the kind of post literate world and if that's if we're on that highway now. You mentioned earlier that you understood their fear. I think we were talking about the students. You understood some of the fears they have and I'm sure you you understand the fears of all the parties involved here and that you share it. I mean is this is this your biggest fear that that we are just h hurtling towards a post-literate society and I would argue again for the reasons I said earlier if we are post-literate then we're also postinking uh I mean it's a very scary thought that I try not to dwell in because it's just also a very depressing thought and um the idea that I you know my profession and what I'm doing is just feeding the machine that like my my most important reader now is a robot. Um, and there's going to be fewer and fewer readers is really scary, not just because they're, you know, because of subscriptions, but because as you said, that means fewer and fewer pe people thinking and and engaging with these ideas. Um, I think ideas can certainly, you know, be expressed in other mediums and that's exciting. Um, but I don't think anybody who's paid attention to the way technology has changed um and shaped teen brains over the past decade and decade and a half and think yeah we need we need more of that you know right I I I think um and and the technology we're talking about now are orders is like orders of magnitude more powerful than the algorithms on Instagram or whatever. Look, I'm just a lowly political theorist, so what do I know? But I do not believe there's a a model of liberal democracy that works in a post-literate society. Don't know one. It's really scary. Yeah, maybe someone can invent one that that's adapted to a society that can only think and communicate and speak in means, but that's not the one we have. And to get from the one we have to that one will probably be messy. Yeah, I don't want to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't really know how to pivot from from all of that heaviness. Um so I'll just do it. Um but it is a question I wanted to ask um because I think it's worth asking about every revolutionary technology and this is definitely that. Do you think this will ultimately reinforce or amplify existing inequalities the way a lot of revolutionary technologies do or or do you think this might help in some way level the playing field? Is this something you thought much about? Yeah, I mean I thought about it a lot in the context of education. um you know there are certainly really good use cases for AI and leveling um the playing field right there as a writing tool. It can be extremely helpful for people writing it in um their second or third language. Um it can be really helpful to create study guides for really dense material and you know put it in ways that are customized to your style of learning. That's that's um really cool. Um you know in terms of how it could uh accelerate these inequalities, you know, the idea that writing and thinking um at a college level can be even more specialized. You know, I kind of put a line in about it becoming, you know, that writing will be an anacron anacronistic elective like basket weaving, right? It's like it's going to be only for people who go to this certain school or can afford this certain school and have the time and privilege to write and therefore to, you know, engage with ideas and and think. And if that's the case, um, who's going to be able to afford to to have those experiences? All right. Uh, James Walsh, the piece is outstanding. Uh, it is called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. I highly recommend it. Go read it. Um, thanks for coming in, man. Thanks, Sean. I enjoyed it.