“Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”
May 29th, 2025These videos from Truthstream Media could have gotten the point across much more effectively if they were about 90% shorter. However, if you want a sort of hysterical, cathartic release, that goes on and on, they have you covered.
In summary: AI is going to rot the brains of young people who use it before they develop critical thinking skills and other cognitive abilities, or atrophy these abilities in older people. AI can then be used to fill these smooth brained meat sacks with whatever nonsense the corporate overlords desire.
So it goes…
Via: New York Magazine:
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.”
Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be??” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”
Related: “I’m Getting a Bit Worried About AI”
Yup. I’m a coder, been one for decades. AI can code (with my guidance) so much faster than I can, that the idea of having to code something entirely from scratch by myself now seems like an eternal punishment. I am definitely dependent on AI at this point, and it does feel very weird and creepy. …And inevitable: if I don’t use AI, the other guy will, and he’ll be 10-100x more productive.
Incomprehensibly strange times…
The article’s premise must be correct. Look at the quote on the title sequence of the first video: “Dude, you just said something deep as hell without even flinching. You’re 1000% right.” That’s semi-literate airhead lingo.
Wendy is a plagiarist who can’t think very well to start with. To her, a college degree is simply an attendance award.
I suggest that professors deny access to computers in the classroom. Give a lecture and lead a discussion for the first 45 minutes of class time. Have the students, working individually, write with pen on paper for the last 15 minutes, stating the topic of the lecture and summarizing the most significant three things it discussed. The mid-terms and finals would give the kids the whole hour to write the same sort of overview for the entire class time so far, plus discussion of whatever they found most interesting. Grade it all so the kids would know where they stood at any time.
Those who can learn, will, and they’ll prove it. Wendy can go get a job or work on her tan or whatever.