Who's Cheating?
And who's changing?
Who's Cheating?
When I sit down to write my weekly editorial I try to see some kind of passion subject (for me) in the collection. Most weeks a pattern emerges. This week it is about cheating.
The New York Magazine published a piece by James D. Walsh titled "Everybody is Cheating their way through College." It was inspired by the story of Chungin "Roy" Lee from Columbia University after he was found to have used AI to complete 80% plus of his projects. He was expelled but has not launched an app - Cluely. The app promotes itself as 'Invisible AI to cheat on everything'.
He was pushed to do so after academia flatly refused to accept that AI can be used as a tool for academic progress. He was a cheat!
I might be wrong but I think Columbia is wrong and Lee may well have the last laugh.
Lets stand back to 60,000 feet and consider society's options. in the past six months we have gained access to significant tools that have a breadth and depth of training on the world's knowledge. Yes, six months. before that the early generation of AI was inclided to make things up. It still does, a little. But way less. And even that can be avoided by using the better reasoning models.
LLMs are not AGI. But they are very good.
So how should education systems react to the fact that anybody that can afford a smartphone (5 billion people in case you are wondering) has access to anything in the field of human knowledge? And it is not like a big library where you have to find the sources and read them. AI has already done that. You can ask it for context, facts, thoughts, answers to questions, references....you name it.
Why would education any longer consist of finding facts, learning them and repeating them with some kind of structure, maybe an essay?
Why would it be cheating to use this new found capability? Imagine if we said it was cheating to get a plane and we had to travel by car. Or cheating to use a computer, we have to use a typewriter.
What has to change is the expectations of the student. now that we have AI the bar should be raised, and those who use it to the best advantage should score higher than those who simply copy and paste its answers to mundane prompts.
Student capability can be boosted by a significant uplift, and marking students can take that into account. The expulsion of Lee was an admission that the systems are behind the technology. It is these systems that are in error, trying to hold back education to a 19th century standard. If they do not I predict new educational institutions not yet born will do so.
If Lee is a bad student then this approach would penalize him through his performance mark. If he is a good student seeking modern tools it would reward him.
Google was found cheating by the courts and this week speculation is rife that it is challenged on three fronts.
Apple's Eddy Cue said that Safari may become and AI browser. Google's stock slumped 8% on the news.
The courts indicated they want Google top sell its advertising exchange - which the company said is not technically feasible.
OpenAI was joined by Anthropic on building web search into its APIs for developers.
Casey Newton's essay 'Stats from a dying web' discusses the possible implications. Newton associates Google's health with the health of the web and publishing and he mourns its possible eclipse by AI discovery:
For more than a year now, I've had one eye trained on how generative AI will reshape the web. My primary fear has been that large language models like those found in ChatGPT are now good enough that large numbers of people are beginning to abandon traditional search engines, starving publishers and websites of the traffic and money they need to continue operating.
and then:
For the moment, Google's AI overviews seem to have quelled the possibility of a sudden mass defection away from its core search engine. But it's now clear that for the first time in decades, a generation is growing up with the possibility of using something other than Google as its default search. Today, they're using ChatGPT to do all their homework assignments. By the time they graduate, they may be using it to do almost everything else.
This observation by Casey is not wrong, but neither is it best viewed by asking who is threatened by it (publishers who depend on traditional web search). Any more than teachers who do not want to change are the right prism for understanding the benefits of AI in education.
AI is an opportunity for teachers, and for publishers, and for Google. But the innovators dilemma affects each of them. The fear that evokes should be a source of inspiration and passion to change and get ahead of the parade.
Essays
AI May Bring Civilizational-scale Change & The New Enlightenment
Peterleyden • Peter Leyden • May 6, 2025
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