Is Using AI Cheating? — Matt Hastings
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Is Using AI Cheating?
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MADE WITH AI, IN THE OPEN
This essay practices what it argues. It was dictated and edited by a human and built with AI, nothing hidden. The ✦ spark marks each AI technique that went into it, and we used all of them. Hover or tap any mark.
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This essay takes its title from the question everyone in education seems to be asking right now: is using AI to do schoolwork cheating?
There are funny videos online of students sitting down with their laptops, reading an essay prompt from their teacher, prompting AI to write the essay, submitting it, closing the laptop, and being on their way. The student is a middle man of prompting between teacher and AI. It is an absurdity that undermines the whole activity.
FOOTNOTE<br>There is something strange about being able to describe what a teacher does as prompting students to produce outputs. When that description comes too easily, it may be a sign that we have not organized that moment of schooling well. More on that to come.
A prompt circling the ring of state, teacher, student, and teacher, with the AI already enveloping the whole sequence.<br>Four people sit in a ring, the state at top, a teacher on the right, the student at the bottom, and a teacher on the left. The AI sits at the center as four overlapping obloids that reach out to each one, like a quad Venn diagram, enveloping the whole sequence. A prompt travels around the ring, pausing at each person while a pulse goes in to the AI and the output returns, before moving on.
AI
WRITES & GRADES & JUDGES
THE STATE
TEACHER
STUDENT
TEACHER
fig. · the AI already envelops the whole sequence; the prompt waits at each person for the output to come back before moving on
The teacher's prompt is trying to get the student to do the act of writing an essay, to produce evidence of their understanding of a topic and their ability to communicate it. Even though the output might be correct, and increasingly AI's outputs are pretty dang good, having AI produce the essay is not evidence of the student's understanding, or of their ability to communicate it. If AI went away tomorrow, that student might not be able to produce a similar essay. And that seems to be a problem: what we really want is for the student to be able to produce that essay without AI doing it for them.
And notice: there is already an interesting involvement of AI in education, well beyond cheating. The main participants, the state, the teacher, the student, the employer, are all using AI to understand what is happening in schools and to take part in them. One way or another, AI has already become a co-creator of the educational experience.
But even before AI made this prompting chain a possible, cheating was a problem. If a student paid another student to write the essay, or went online and paid somebody to write it, we would call that cheating. So AI is not uniquely causing the problem. But it is exacerbating it, because it has made it very, very cheap and easy to not write the essay, or do the other performative paperwork of schooling.
FOOTNOTE · PLATO<br>Further back, Plato questioned whether being able to produce an essay or argument was evidence of much at all. Speaking or writing wise and true words does not mean you are wise or have knowledge.
What is evidence that someone knows something in the first place? We will leave that to the psychometricians. But the challenge of producing evidence reveals a tension. We want to say this person knows X, meaning it is embodied, integrated, part of who they are. Mostly what we get are behaviors and performances we take as proxies. And we resent the charlatan: the one who sounds smart, but when put to the test, can't actually do the thing. This may also be a reason why some resent the use of AI to write essays like this one - does this author actually know anything?
But specifically, why do we care whether a student actually writes the essay or just prompts AI to write it? Some reasons:
One reason is that schools are like weird extensions of HR departments. Over the first 18 to 22-plus years of a student's life, we are trying to evaluate what they know and what they can do, so we can sort them into roles and professions and help employers find the right people to do the job. We really want to know who knows what and who can do what. It seems to matter a lot. If students are cheating en masse, the evidence of who is right for a job is compromised, and our ability to recognize who should do what, and why, erodes.
Another reason is that the activities of school can shape you. Having to show up every day, five days a week, and be there on time, ready to absorb knowledge, to compose that knowledge into the ability to write essays and do equations and solve problems, are all pretty good...