Okay. I was going to write one thing. I probably still will. But this made me realize something. So I'm going to write that first. Because it was a "my god it's full of stars" moment. The reason there are so many of these articles is journalists recognize that AI will expose them as the fucking frauds they are. Oops, wrong tone hang on a minute If my deep and abiding hatred for liberal arts education and its practitioners is unclear, here's a refresher. The TL;DR on that is "it's all about the unpaid internships and everyone knows it" but in case that's unclear lemme draw out a couple beats on Our Hero Chungin "Roy" Lee: It takes a special kind of NYMag article to start with that guy and roll into "zomfg our students will never learn Keats" or some shit but let's check back on Roy a couple hundred words later: Note that Columbia disciplined him for coming up with an app that helped people cheat on job interviews, nothing to do with college. Hey, what's Roy up to now? This is Roy BTW, in case you were unsure _____________________________________________________ If I had to guess, this started as an article titled something like "college is a fucking sham" and then the editorial board lost their minds and it turned into "Pearls Clutched; Are Our Children Learning." Because really, what it says is "college is a fucking sham, as finally revealed to one and all via ChatGPT." For my entire goddamn life there's been this hand-wringing "we must teach them the cultuuuur" aspect to education which is entirely about liberal arts majors justifying their degrees. Does anyone else think it's really fucking funny that we created an academic culture so heavily reliant on essays that one in five students have a learning disability diagnosis on file for that sweet, sweet extra test and assignment time? My sister is working on a teaching certificate right now (until tomorrow, anyway, when she'll likely withdraw because she caught my mother's c-diff). It's some dumb bullshit University of Phoenix thing where she was super-offended that her first homework assignment was poorly graded because of the grammar and spelling (no notes on ideas or concepts whatsoever). I told her to take her essay and have ChatGPT grade it, and once she corrected it it got a 100%. If both sides of the divide are using AI what the fuck is the point. I've used radar detectors as an analogy for arms races for going on 40 years. First you had cops and you had speeders. Then the cops started using radar. Then the speeders started using radar detectors. Then the cops started using lasers. then the speeders started using laser detectors. now you've got your speed trap reported on Waze. It's an arms race. Here's the funny thing, though: The NHTSA knew that radar detectors improved traffic safety in 1988. The point wasn't safety, though. The point was ticket revenue. So... arms race. I'm fucking old. I'm so fucking old that I had to deal with "ZOMFG do we let the kids use graphing calculators in Algerbra" and then, four years later, "ZOMFG do we let the kids use calculators on the SAT." 30 years later, fucking of course you do. Because learning how to use a calculator isn't learning how to do math, it's learning how to do computation and the difference between learning to use a calculator, learning to use a trig table and learning to use a slide rule isn't "did you learn" it's "what's your source of error." "What's your source of error" on liberal arts bullshit has always been a joke. I used to play with my teachers like a cat with a mouse. I'd inject logical fallacies to see if they caught them. I'd use metaphors that undercut my point to see if they'd notice. They never did. They weren't grading on whether or not I learned the material, they were grading on whether I could vomit up a five paragraph essay. Which have always been mad-libs, by the way. I taught my kid how to vomit up a 5-paragraph essay when she was eight years old. It's protective camo. If you say abject fucking nonsense with decent grammar and spelling there isn't a TA or teacher in the world who won't give you a decent grade because they're victims of this structure where they have to grade a hundred 5-paragraph essays a month. Hey pearl-clutching NYMag got anything to say about that Protective coloration, sure. I can write in a bunch of different registers. My wife has handwriting in different fonts. Right. If you need the anecdotes you need to tell the robot. and nothing of value was lost because not a single five-paragraph essay ever written mattered fuckall even six weeks later but academia has been clinging to them for a hundred years anyway. If you can't say anything you fucking want in a 5-paragraph essay intended for an overworked, underpaid TA? you have a learning disability. Go get your doctor's note and another couple hours. Or, I dunno. Feed it to Saltman. It's fucking pointless anyway, liberal arts grading has been where knowledge goes to die anyway. I did an engineering education at two schools. One of them was good, the other one was the #4 undergrad program in the world according to US News at the time. At the good school we were allowed a single page of hand-written notes for all quizes and exams. It became about density, and about selection, and about prediction - what formulae are you likely to need? easily 60% of our studying was about assembling that tool over and over and over again so that we could walk into class and bang out a decent answer with nothing but a TI-85 and a pencil. At the world-beater we slammed that shit into Excel's "Solver" and TAs literally weighed our Finite Element Analysis reports. I had to have mine regraded because rather than kill five reams of paper I'd do two and then write "etc" so the TA judged my report to be an F even though the answers were right. Yep, Denton's Folly (see above note). I don't make much of this but I've been interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. I've been interviewed by The Atlantic. I've been interviewed by The Daily Beast. Every article was deeply disappointing because even among these stalwart organizations, they're all fucking phoning it in. I have no Gell-Mann Amnesia because I've had enough personal experience with journalism to know that the only journalists worth bothering with are the ones who actually go visit what they're reporting on and those are few and far between. Why is journalism failing? because most of it is pointless. The entire fucking industry was propped up by classified ads, which is why the existential threat to journalism was never Google or Facebook or whatever it was fucking Craigslist. The existential threat to academia isn't AI, it's the world discovering the dilution driving enrollment You wanna solve AI cheating in college? Here walk with me it's fucking easy: 1) assign reading outside of class 2) give over half of class time to small-group discussion 3) Give over the other half to closed-note, no-technology short-answer quizzes. Have the kids show up with a pencil and paper and demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter. No more fucking essays. FUCK ESSAYS. I say that as a dipshit with a novel, three graphic novels, two optioned screenplays and a history of being repped at three different marquee agencies - FUCK ESSAYS. They show that you're good at writing essays, not that you know what you're talking about and the fact that the liberal arts have leaned on this shit for a hundred years is why the liberal arts have such a self-inflated regard for themselves. Liberal arts journalism: "ZOMFG AI is destroying knowledge as we know it" Finance journalism: "ZOMFG kids are making $60k a year out of high school because they took wood shop" Castro took a $50,000 pay cut when he left his job as an automotive technician in 2015. He said he was inspired by his mother, also a teacher. The district has since adjusted its salary formula to reflect industry experience. Castro now makes $100,000 a year, matching his former income. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he said, helping launch young adults into well-paying careers and having his summers free. Hey University of Phoenix you got anything to say about this that aged really really well Let's get back to my buddy Roy. This was likely the biggest event in his parents' life. He "got into Harvard" which means his parents bought their way in. Any idea why, Roy? every. single. one. of these articles. Is about how students are betraying the hallowed glories of an undergraduate education without the barest acknowledgment of what a naked scam an undergraduate education has been for a generation or more. Journalists in particular are clutching their pearls about this because while nobody can agree about what flavor of bullshit their career is, they all agree it's bullshit. I'll coin a rule of thumb: if you're worried about AI coming for your job, you should be. If you aren't, it might not be because you're a feckless moron who doesn't know when to listen to journalists, it's maybe because you actually have some expertise.
Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia.
Interview Coder’s website featured a banner that read F_CK LEETCODE. Lee posted a video of himself on YouTube using it to cheat his way through an internship interview with Amazon. (He actually got the internship, but turned it down.) A month later, Lee was called into Columbia’s academic-integrity office. The school put him on disciplinary probation after a committee found him guilty of “advertising a link to a cheating tool” and “providing students with the knowledge to access this tool and use it how they see fit,” according to the committee’s report.
Before launching Cluely, Lee and Shanmugam raised $5.3 million from investors, which allowed them to hire two coders, friends Lee met in community college (no job interviews or LeetCode riddles were necessary), and move to San Francisco. When we spoke a few days after Cluely’s launch, Lee was at his Realtor’s office and about to get the keys to his new workspace. He was running Cluely on his computer as we spoke. While Cluely can’t yet deliver real-time answers through people’s glasses, the idea is that someday soon it’ll run on a wearable device, seeing, hearing, and reacting to everything in your environment. “Then, eventually, it’s just in your brain,” Lee said matter-of-factly.
Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.”
Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot.
Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”
It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants. In February, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published a study that found a person’s confidence in generative AI correlates with reduced critical-thinking effort. The net effect seems, if not quite Wall-E, at least a dramatic reorganization of a person’s efforts and abilities, away from high-effort inquiry and fact-gathering and toward integration and verification.
A teenager can make $20 an hour as a welder’s helper after graduating from high school with technical-education classes, Hughes said. Another year of welding instruction at a community college can boost pay to $60,000 a year for pipeline jobs in Bakersfield-area oil fields. Even with the expansion of the district’s vocational classes, student demand outpaces available seats. Last school year, 6,200 students applied for 2,500 spots at the two vocational campuses. The wait-list for auto shop is 300 students, said Fernando Castro, one of the instructors.
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”