Is ChatGPT killing higher education?

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Is ChatGPT killing higher education?"

Podcast: Decoder (The Gray Area guest episode)
Host: Sean Illing (with guest James Walsh, journalist for NY Magazine's Intelligencer)
Date: August 25, 2025

---

Overview

This episode features Sean Illing in conversation with journalist James Walsh, whose recent reporting explores the pervasive use of AI tools like ChatGPT in higher education, particularly in the context of academic cheating. Their discussion delves deep into the evolving landscape of student learning, the morality and practicality of AI-assisted work, the psychological and institutional impacts, and what this acceleration of technology might mean for the future of writing, thinking, and the value of a college degree.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The New Cheating Utopia: AI’s Explosive Impact

• AI as the New Norm: Walsh describes that almost every student and professor he spoke to is touched by AI—whether they call it cheating or not, it's everywhere. ([05:04])
• Old vs. New Cheating: Traditional methods (e.g., crib notes, glancing at a neighbor’s paper) persist, but “the ceiling’s been blown off” by AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude. ([05:43])
• Notable Quote:
  • “The floor of cheating is still there. It’s just that, like, the ceiling’s been blown off.” (James Walsh, [05:43])

---

2. Student Motivations, Justifications, and Experiences

• How Students Use AI:
  • ChatGPT is shorthand for AI, heavily used for everything from essay writing to coding to note-taking and summary.
  • Many code assignments by computer science students are now routinely handled by AI, leading to problems when real-world tests require actual understanding. ([09:13] – [11:05])
• Changing Attitudes:
  • Example of one student who went from AI-optimism (advocating for classroom integration) to wanting it banned after personal experience. ([06:50])
  • Students justify their use with arguments of efficiency, inevitability (“this is the game now”), and fear of being left behind. ([16:46])
• Competing Student Narratives:
  • Some are pragmatic and see college as transactional (“here to find a co-founder and a wife” – Roy Lee, [18:59]).
  • Others are ambivalent or nostalgic, fearing loss of critical thinking and the joy of writing, but nevertheless partaking. Wendy, for example, draws the line at copy-paste, but still lets AI structure her essays. ([21:37] – [23:53])

Notable Moments

• AI Addiction:
  One student posted on Reddit, seeking help for what she called a "chatgpt addiction." ([06:50])
• Trojan Horse Assignments:
  Professors plant bizarre prompts (e.g., "mention broccoli or Dua Lipa") to catch cut-and-paste AI essays, and some students submit these blindly, without reading. ([13:27])

---

3. The Blurred Lines—Assistance or Cheating?

• Detecting AI Use:
  AI detection tools are unreliable, can be gamed, and miss students who use AI for idea generation rather than composing text. ([14:53])
• Redefining Writing:
  Both students and professors recognize a shift: “What does the future of writing look like? It probably looks a lot more like editing.” (University of Florida administrator, [16:08])

---

4. Professor and Administrator Responses

• Faculty Despair:
  The majority of professors Walsh interviewed feel demoralized, unable to keep up with, detect, or effectively punish AI misuse. “They don’t know how to police AI usage. And even when they know an essay is AI generated, the recourse is really thorny.” ([31:29])
• Coping Mechanisms:
  • Some professors revert to oral exams or handwritten essays (blue books), accepting the inevitability of AI but seeking new assessment models. ([34:11])
  • Others start using AI themselves for textbooks, lectures, and grading, raising questions about consistency and fairness.
    • “There’s been a little reporting ... not just to write lectures, but to even grade papers. ... Opens up the very real possibility that right now an AI is grading itself and offering comments on an essay that it wrote.” ([37:21])
• AI Usage Among Faculty:
  Students reportedly take pleasure in "catching" professors using AI. ([37:21])

---

5. Institutional Incentives and Blind Spots

• Administrative Ambivalence:
  University administrators are slow to act, either due to lack of awareness or a vested interest in maintaining enrollment regardless of educational integrity. ([39:52])
• Notable Quote:
  • “They were super responsive to Covid because it was a threat to the bottom line... AI, on the other hand, doesn't threaten the bottom line in that way, or at least it doesn't yet.” (Sean Illing, [40:43])
• Commercial Pressures:
  OpenAI and others are reportedly holding back robust AI detection to maintain market share and student adoption. ([43:36])

---

6. Existential and Social Risks

• Loss of Critical Habits:
  Both host and guest express anxiety that relying on AI will erode essential skills—writing as a way of thinking, self-discipline, and the development of an intellectual identity. ([47:33] – [49:41])
• Are We Just Old Men Yelling at Clouds?
  The debate over whether this is a “moral panic” or a real transformation is acknowledged; Sam Altman’s “calculator for words” analogy is rejected as simplistic and harmful.
  • “Do you not understand the difference between ... spellcheck and something that generates ideas for you? … Of course there’s a difference.” (James Walsh, [50:56])
• Post-Literate, Post-Thinking Society:
  Walsh and Illing worry about the ramifications for democracy, referencing the irreplaceable value of literacy and critical thinking in civic life. ([54:51] – [56:14])

---

7. Inequality and the Future of Education

• Will AI Level or Widen the Field?
  • Positive potential: AI could help non-native speakers, those with different learning styles, or students at under-resourced schools.
  • Risks: True writing and deep thinking could become privileges for the few, furthering inequality. Writing might become an “anachronistic elective, like basket weaving.” (James Walsh, [57:04])
• Key Quote:
  • “Writing will be an anachronistic elective, like basket weaving. ... Who’s going to be able to afford ... to write and therefore engage with ideas and think?” ([57:04])

---

Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “The floor of cheating is still there. It’s just that, like, the ceiling’s been blown off.” — James Walsh ([05:43])
• “If you are depending on AI now you are just training yourself to be an assistant ... the most replaceable person in the workforce.” — Computer science professor (summarized by Walsh, [11:10])
• “College ... just a transactional place that gets you something very specific ... the idea of college as a place where you just go to grow intellectually is long gone.” — James Walsh ([20:17])
• “I think the best part about this assignment was watching students in real time kind of decide where the line is on cheating.” — James Walsh ([21:37])
• “Writing is thinking ... I don’t even know what I think until I write.” — Sean Illing ([49:41])
• “Do you not understand the difference ... between spell check and something that’s generating ideas for you?” — James Walsh ([50:56])
• “Writing will be an anachronistic elective, like basket weaving.” — James Walsh ([57:04])

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• The scope of AI-facilitated cheating revealed: [05:04] – [08:46]
• How students use AI tools and impact on learning: [09:13] – [16:37]
• Diverging student philosophies – Roy Lee and Wendy: [18:40] – [25:22]
• Blurring the lines between assistance and cheating: [13:27] – [15:59]
• Professor despair and institutional paralysis: [31:20] – [41:56]
• Societal consequences—literacy and democracy: [54:19] – [56:32]
• Closing thoughts on technology, inequality, and the future of writing: [57:04] – [58:18]

---

Tone and Language

The episode blends skepticism, humor, and candid worry. Walsh and Illing are analytical but also confessional, sharing personal anxieties about what this technological shift could mean for the next generation and society at large.

---

Summary

This conversation offers a nuanced, often sobering look at how AI is rapidly transforming higher education. While there are fleeting glimpses of optimism—especially regarding access and potential for educational customization—the overwhelming mood is one of emergency: academic integrity is eroding, essential intellectual skills are at risk, and institutions seem unprepared or unwilling to address the problem. Walsh’s reporting illustrates not just a cheating arms race, but a bigger existential crisis with implications for education, civic life, and inequality.

---

For listeners interested in the fate of higher education, the future of work, and the profound impacts of AI on society, this episode is essential.

Transcript

[Robinhood Advertiser]

Support for this show comes from Robinhood. Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? With Robinhood, not only can you trade individual stocks and ETFs, you can also seamlessly buy and sell crypto at low costs. Trade all in one place. Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or civic protected. Investing involves risk including loss of principal. Securities trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC. MemberCIPIC a registered broker dealer.

[Thumbtack Advertiser]

Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to don't know the difference between matte, paint, finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app Download today.

[Expedia Advertiser]

Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes. But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia, she bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel Flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.

[Cade Cox]

Hello, this is Decoder senior producer Cade Cox. As you can tell, I'm still not Neelie. Sorry, but I do hope you've been enjoying our series of guest hosts this summer while he's out on parental leave. We hear the family's doing well and we look forward to him coming back. But until then, we have a few more really great guest episodes coming up, so stay tuned. The production team is taking our own break this week, so while we're off, we're excited to share this episode of the Gray Area with you students all over the country, including my own kids, thank goodness, are back in school right around now. So we thought it would be a perfect time to revisit host Sean Illing talking with journalist James Walsh about how AI tools like ChatGPT have kicked off a new cheating arms race that's proving extremely disruptive to college education. There are a lot of big decoder ideas and problems wrapped up in all this. Okay, The Gray Area with Sean Illing. Enjoy.

[Sean Illing]

What's the point of college if no one's actually doing the work? It's not a rhetorical question. More and more, students are not doing the work. They're offloading their essays, their homework, even their exams to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude Copilot. They're not just study aids anymore. They're doing everything. We are living in a cheating utopia, and professors know this. They see it. It's becoming more common. But they can't always prove it. And more often than not, they're too burned out or unsupported to do anything about it. So what are we doing here? What is higher education at this point? I'm Sean Iling, and this is the Gray Area. My guest today is James Walsh. He's a features writer for New York magazine's Intelligencer and the author of the most unsettling piece I've read about the impact of AI on. On higher education. Walsh spent months talking to students and professors who are living through this moment. And what he found isn't just a story about cheating. It's a story about ambivalence and disillusionment and despair. A story about what happens when technology moves much faster than our institutions can adapt. We cover a lot of ground here. We talk about the students who are cheating because they can, the ones who are cheating because they feel like they have to. We talk about the professors who are giving up, the administrators who don't want to confront the problem, and what all of this means not just for the future of college, but the future of writing and thinking. James Walsh, welcome to the show.

[James Walsh]

Thank you for having me.

[Sean Illing]

I'm glad you're here. I love this piece, and I'm really excited to talk to you about. Resonated with me on a few different levels, which I'm sure we will get to. I'll just start. I mean, it doesn't seem like AI is your beat, as it were. So how did you get drawn into the wonderful world of AI cheating?

[James Walsh]

My editor and I were having just a conversation about cheating and not AI. So I started doing these interviews and kind of realized that there was no way to write a cheating story without it being about AI and not only that, it was like, oh, everybody I'm talking to is in some way cheating. Even if they don't think it's cheating, it's just everywhere. And it's like bending the. The very definition of cheating.

[Sean Illing]

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.

[James Walsh]

I did talk, Yeah, I talked to students who were like, oh, the kind of old school cheating, you know, the tradecraft is still there. They're still, you know, whether it's people using Apple watches to pull up PDFs or, you know, scribbling something on 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.

[Sean Illing]

I'm both elated and, and bummed that I missed the golden age.

[James Walsh]

I, I know I would go back and forth like, yeah, I, I use SparkNotes. Of course I use, you know, every once in a while I peach at SparkNotes. I'm, I'm actually very glad that I didn't have this tool when I was in college.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, I am too, ultimately. And we will also get to that, I'm sure. 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?

[James Walsh]

The reporting process for finding the students was sort of like any kind of story, I'll talk to anybody. So I would find them through student newspapers was a big one, whether they were mentioned in a story or a few of them had written op eds. So those students were of course eager to talk about AI, even on the record, because they had written op eds. In fact, one memorable interview was a student as a freshman. She had written kind of an opinion, optimistic AI op ed, 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 as a sophomore sometime in the past few months, and the first thing she said was 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 how many more students over just the past two semesters are using it. And then another kind of notable one where I reached out to a lot of students who were having these conversations already on Reddit and Discord. And one student in Canada, she went on to her schools thread on, on Reddit and, and said, I have a problem. Do you guys have any advice for how to like kick a chatgpt addiction? Because I am fully addicted. And it was a really earnest kind of request. And so I reached out to her and she was like, yeah, let's, let's talk. And then of course, just, you know, one student can lead to another student. And just kind of trying to speak with every sort of student I could find.

[Sean Illing]

Well, let's walk through the tools that students are using because 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 chatbots. What are the main platforms are we talking about, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and how are students using them to cheat?

[James Walsh]

Sure. I mean, the vast majority of students I talked to were using ChatGPT, OpenAI's platform chatbot, and so much so that sometimes they would even refer to ChatGPT and then I'd go back to them and maybe they were using another platform. But ChatGPT was just kind of shorthand for a chatbot or AI. But of course, students talked about using Anthropic, Claude and Gemini, Google and Copilot, and they were using it for kind of every facet of their education, really. I think it's my bias as an English major and a writer where I was really interested in hearing how they were using it to write their essays or outline their essays, or generate ideas for their essays. But students were also eager to talk about how they used it to take notes during class for them, or summarize textbooks, or create study guides and outlines. And then one of the biggest use cases is just computer science students who are using it to code, some science students using it to analyze data, but the computer science students using it to code is just a huge use case. I spoke with a professor, a computer science professor at Berkeley, one of the top computer science schools in the country, who said his students have a serious problem. Tons of his students are using it on their take home assignments and then when they're tested on the same sorts of problems in class, they're failing.

[Sean Illing]

Have they realized that if they're using the chatbots to code that they actually won't be needed as coders?

[James Walsh]

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 you put it, you know, the way he put it was an assistant to an AI platform and you are going to be the most replaceable person in the workforce. And he said that, you know, he has had conversations with executives at 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.

[Sean Illing]

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 really feel in their bones or people are just, just kind of rolling with it?

[James Walsh]

You know, that's a good, that's a really good question. I, I will say, you know, certainly a good percentage of the students I spoke to have concerns and are aware to some extent of what their doing as they rely more and more on AI. I think there's maybe kind of a whiplash going on here in a sense that they're entering school at a time when 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 I might as well offload this learning or 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. And I understand that fear.

[Sean Illing]

So what's the simplest example of the process here of how people are using it? Is it as simple as you go in there and you say, hey, I'm reading such and such books. You know, I'm going to upload a PDF of said book. Here's my essay prompt, give it to me. I mean, is it pretty much that straightforward?

[James Walsh]

Yes. I mean, it depends on kind of the type of student, the type of class, the type of school you're going to. 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, who are taking their prompt from their professor, copying and pasting it into ChatGPT and saying, I need a four to five page essay 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 the so called Trojan horse method where they're dropping in kind of these non sequiturs into their prompts. Mention broccoli, mention dua lipa, say something about Finland into their prompt so that if you were to just copy and paste the prompt into ChatGPT, the essay that it spits out will say something about broccoli or dua lipa. And there are students who are just blindly copying and pasting those essays and Handing them in. So not only are they not writing their papers, they're not even reading them.

[Sean Illing]

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 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.

[James Walsh]

And every professor I spoke to said 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 know 70% of your essay for you. And if you do that other 30% to cover your tracks and kind of make it your own, you know, it can, it can write you a pretty good essay. 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 will scan an essay and say, you know, there's assign some grade. 70% chance that this is AI generated. And that's really just looking at the language and deciding whether or not that language was created by an LLM or an algorithm. And it doesn't account for big ideas, it doesn't 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 kind of writing. It's sort of like paint by numbers at that point.

[Sean Illing]

Well, it reduces everyone to editors, right? You're just going in there and manipulating the language that the machine gives you.

[James Walsh]

In fact, I had a conversation with the University of Florida has been eager to adopt. A lot of schools have, but University of Florida in particular, the administration's eager to adopt AI. And I had conversation with 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 he admitted that.

[Sean Illing]

Did you find that students are relating very differently to all of this, to these changes? What was the general vibe you got?

[James Walsh]

It was a pretty wide perspective on AI. There were students who I spoke to a student at the University of Wisconsin who said, I realized AI was a problem when I would walk in last fall, walking into the library and fully at least half of the students were using ChatGPT. And it was at that moment that she started thinking about her classroom discussions and, and some of the peer reviewed essays she was reading and students were. The one example she gave that really stuck with me was 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 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. So there are students like that, and then there are students who sort of feel like they have to use AI, because if they're not using AI, they're at a disadvantage. And not only that, AI is going to be around no matter what for the rest of their lives. So they feel as if college to some extent now is about training them to use AI. And then there are the students who are like, why not? It's something at our disposal. And we go to school to learn how to be efficient. And this is sort of, as one student put it, a hackable assignment. So I might as well use it to hack.

[Sean Illing]

There's this guy, Roy Lee, who's an interesting character, sort of the protagonist of the piece in some ways, and he has this interesting path from community college to Columbia to startup founder. What did you make of him and his story?

[James Walsh]

Sure, Roy. Roy is somebody who just has always known he wants to be a founder and. And he's been laser focused on that. And so he told me about going to Columbia and using AI to cruise his way through every assignment. He just did not care about the assignments. And because he had such a winding road to Columbia, I had to stop him and say, why would you go through so much effort? He took a gap year and then did a year at community college to get into an elite school like Columbia and then just not take advantage of it at all and not do the work. And he said, I'm here to find a co founder and a wife. And I think he was really helpful 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 gets you something very specific and is kind of the stepping stone. I thought that was really kind of instructive.

[Sean Illing]

It does kind of give the game away a little bit.

[James Walsh]

Right.

[Sean Illing]

I mean, going to college, it's, you know, get out of here with this business about learning.

[James Walsh]

Right, right.

[Sean Illing]

It's just, it's a networking activity.

[James Walsh]

Right. 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 at this place where you just go to grow intellectually is long gone.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, no, I. Look, it makes me a little sad, but I respect the game. I respect the honesty.

[James Walsh]

Sure, sure. Yeah.

[Sean Illing]

I mean, was that a pretty common perspective among students, especially at the more elite universities?

[James Walsh]

You know, I wouldn't say it was common with the students I spoke to, but those students often sort of talked divisively, I think, about other students who had that perspective in certain majors and kind of their. They would talk about their classmates in finance and some in computer science who really felt like, you know, they were there for networking.

[Sean Illing]

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 ChatGPT. What was the story she was telling herself to justify that? Or if that's the wrong word, what was her explanation?

[James Walsh]

I think Wendy was sort of the best example, kind of spoke to a lot of students. Experiences where she understands the honor code as it's written, and she views cheating now as anyone who copies and pastes from ChatGPT into their Google Doc and then turns it in. And she, like I was saying earlier, somebody who uses ChatGPT to formulate ideas, to 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 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 she was nostalgic for the act of actually writing, but felt as if she wasn't cheating by outsourcing. The deep thinking that essays are meant to provoke, you know, outsourcing that to an AI, she just didn't feel like it was cheating at all.

[Sean Illing]

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 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, right? 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 or go to the ball game or whatever. You know, it's asking a lot, it's asking a lot of students to not partake.

[James Walsh]

It is, it is. And I am somebody personally who, like when ChatGPT, the version as we know it, in November 2022 came out shortly after, it was the first time I really played around with it. I was like, ah, it's a party trick. And I think in the course of reporting the story, I played with it a lot more to familiarize myself with it. And it was the first time I realized, oh, if I had two paragraphs and needed a transition and I couldn't come up with it, it could offer me something. And I am much older than these students and there was an immediate realization of if I start doing this now, I am going to lose something. Like there's some part of my brain is not going to flex and work. And that is really scary. That's scary to me. And it's enough of a deterrent that I just don't want to do that. And to put that sort of ask on 18 year olds, 19 year olds, 20 year olds is crazy to me because like you said, they have clubs to be at or they have, as one student put, sometimes an essay just needs to get rid or something, you know.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, touche.

[James Walsh]

Yeah.

[Sean Illing]

I'm just curious. Did you, did any of 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?

[James Walsh]

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 that she talked about. And I opened the essay and it was about critical pedagogy, this theory, you know, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian thinker on learning methods. And I went back to her and said, you have to see the irony in using AI to write about critical pedagogy. And she really first just, I think quickly flipped it on me and she's like, what do you think? And I said, no, I mean, explain this to me. And I think she had lines in the essay about learning is what makes us human. And so I asked her again about it and she said something about I do think depending on AI you're going to lose some critical thinking. But it's there. AI is always going to be there for us, so we might as well be using it.

[Sean Illing]

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.

[James Walsh]

I don't know, I. I can't really speak at all to the nuances of that in computer science or in sciences. And what you have to learn in order to get AI to do what you want, I just can't speak to it. But in terms of essay writing, it's just kind of intuitive, I think. And I don't know necessarily what you're learning by copying and pasting a prompt into ChatGPT. I mean any like, you know, anybody can do that. So I don't really understand when people talk about like teaching students to use AI in in the arts or humanities. I still don't really know what that looks like.

[Tech Domains Advertiser]

Support for this show comes from Tech Domains what's in a Name? Quite a lot actually, especially when you're starting a business and you probably took the time craft the perfect name that communicates your business idea clearly. But when it comes to checking the dot com, you might find the names already taken or at the very least priced like Rent in Palo Alto. And sure, you could settle for an odd spelling or extra numbers. But with tech domain, you don't have to compromise. Get the startup name you actually want on tech. Absolutely no compromises. What's more, when you use tech, you signal to your customers and investors that you're building tech with just your domain name. So if you've got a name in mind, search for it now with tech on a trusted platform like GoDaddy or Visit. Get Tech Slash Decoder to grab it. That's Get Tech Decoder. Support for this show comes from OpenPhone. If you're a business owner, your company's phone system should make it easier for your customers to communicate with you. You'd think that's obvious enough that it shouldn't have to be said, but how often is that actually true? OpenPhone is a business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer, so your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts. That way, any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off and their AI agent can be set up in minutes to handle calls after hours, answer questions and capture leads so you never miss a customer. That means that for the 60,000 plus businesses that use OpenPhone, voicemail is a thing of the past. OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off their first six months at openphone.com decoder that's o p e n p h o n e.com decoder and if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. OpenPhone no missed calls, no missed customers Support for the show comes from Framer so you've dragged your feet on getting your own website. Or maybe you've signed up for a website builder, but you're bored with the cookie cutter templates that make your site look the same as anybody else's. It might be time to try Framer. Framer is the design first, no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. You can get inspiration from hundreds of templates or strike out on your own from a totally blank canvas. Multiplayer collaboration means your writer, designer and marketer can all tweak the same page at once with no risk of corrupting version control. And under the hood you'll get responsive breakpoints built in, hosting a flexible CSM and privacy friendly analytics so that you know what's working and what needs fixing. And at every step, Framer's AI powered Dev assistant helps you generate banners, pricing tables, navigation bars and more, all specified to your palette and branding. Ready to build a site that looks hand coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for [e-mail] and use code decoder to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com promo code decoder. Rules and restrictions may apply.

[Sean Illing]

Let's talk about the professor perspective. I mean the professors you spoke to all seem to share something pretty close to despair.

[James Walsh]

Yes, those are primarily the professors in writing heavy classes or computer science classes. You know they're were professors who I spoke to who actually were really bullish on AI. I spoke to one professor doesn't appear in the piece but she is at UCLA and she teaches I believe comparative literature and used AI to create her textbook, her entire textbook for this class this semester and she says it's about best class she's ever had and so I think there are some people who are optimistic she was an outlier in terms of the professors I spoke to, for the most part professors were yes, in despair. They don't know how to police AI usage. And even when they know an essay is AI generated, the recourse there is is really thorny. If you're going to accuse a student of using AI, there's no real good way to prove it. And students know this, so they can always deny, deny, deny. And just the sheer volume of AI generated essays or paragraphs is overwhelming. So that just on the surface level is extremely frustrating and has a lot of professors down. Now if we kind of zoom out and just think also kind of about education in general, this just raises a lot of really uncomfortable questions for teachers and administrators about the value of each assignment and extrapolate that out. Not just the value of assignment, but the value of degree, of the degree in education in general.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, I mean, look, I was a professor very briefly and it is very easy to spot when someone hasn't authored their own work. I mean you can kind of tell. But knowing improving are very different things like you were saying. 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. Which again 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.

[James Walsh]

Yeah, 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 do the CSI sort of thing and then go to the for every AI generated essay is just not sustainable. So what professors and administrators are kind of talking about is one upfront getting students the most important thing for them to learn at this point is why they shouldn't be using AI and convincing them not to use AI. Cheating in general is the kind of research on it shows that cheating comes from a lot of different factors that we all understand. You cut corners when you're stressed or short on time. There are all these external factors. And I think if we can really get students to understand what they're losing by cheating, that's the number one method of making sure they don't use AI. From there, there's the practical stuff, like going back to blue books. I talked to one professor who's switched 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, but he has really enjoyed having this one on one time with students and getting to ask them questions 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.

[Sean Illing]

What does he think is lost?

[James Walsh]

Well, just the ability to write. Right. There are plenty of students who are going to do a better job writing and sitting and thinking than sitting down with a professor and fumbling through a conversation that. That sucks for those students. That would have sucked for me in college. So there is something that's lost. So I think there's got to be some sort of ad hoc way that can be a combination of blue books, orals, and getting students to really understand the value of doing their own work.

[Sean Illing]

I kind of go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago. 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 do your lesson planning. Right.

[James Walsh]

A lot of professors, and I understand why, are also telling their students it's okay to use AI as long as they cite their work.

[Sean Illing]

Or.

[James Walsh]

In some cases, they'll ask for a printout of the conversation between the student and the AI just as a way to, like, kind of show the thinking.

[Sean Illing]

How many professors do you think now are just having AI write all their lectures?

[James Walsh]

You know, there's been a little reporting on. On this. I don't know how many are. I know that there are a lot of platforms that are advertising themselves or asking professors to use them more, not just to write lectures, but to even grade papers. Which, of course, 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. And this is pretty widespread stuff. Microsoft has given this platform to all the students in the Sao Paulo High school network, and there are plenty of universities across the country offering teachers this technology. And students love to talk about catching their professors using AI. It brings a lot of joy.

[Sean Illing]

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. That's pretty bleak. Was that a pretty common level of demoralization in your reporting?

[James Walsh]

I've spoke to another couple of professors who are like, you know, I'm nearing retirement, so it's not my problem, and good luck figuring it out. Younger generation. Cool. Yeah, I mean, it is. I just don't think people outside of Academia realize what a seismic change is coming. And it's, it's. And it's in many ways a canary. Right? This is something that we're all going to have to deal with professionally. And it's happening much, much faster than anyone anticipated. I spoke with somebody who works on education at Anthropic who, who said we expected students to 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.

[Sean Illing]

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?

[James Walsh]

I mean, I want to give administrators more credit than that. I don't. You don't. You. I mean, I guess you, you have a lot more experience in academia than I do, so, you know, I'll take your word for it. I mean, I, you know, I do think there is a vein of AI optimism among a certain type of person of a certain generation who saw the tech boom and thought, I missed out on that wave, and now I want to adopt. I want to be part of this new wave, this future, this inevitable future that's coming. So they want to adopt the technology and aren't really picking up on how dangerous it might be.

[Sean Illing]

I still know a lot of people who teach at universities, and I talk to them all the time, and a lot of them tell me that they feel very much on their own with this, that the administrators 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 to respond to that, but they're much more content to let the whole AI thing play out. And just so that it's clear what I'm saying, and this is me saying this, this is my opinion. 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?

[James Walsh]

No, I, I don't.

[Sean Illing]

I don't.

[James Walsh]

No, no, I genuinely don't think that. Too harsh. I think there may be a factor. There is 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. But you are right. I did speak with many professors who go to administrators or even just older teachers, TAs going to professors and saying this is a problem. As I spoke to one teacher, one TA at a writing course at Iowa, 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. 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 system that hasn't been updated in forever. And in the case of kind of the US's educational higher ed, it's like, yeah, for a long time it's been this transactional experience. 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.

[Sean Illing]

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 the result of a decision not to understand fair. And that to me is just as obscene.

[James Walsh]

And many of these universities do have partnerships with AI. And what you said about universities can also be said about AI, that for the most part these are companies or companies within nonprofits that are trying to get capture customers. One of the kind of more dystopian moments. 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 have created a chatbot for children under 8 years old or 10 years old or something. And it was kind of a disturbing experience. But they are trying to capture these younger customers and built this loyalty. There's been reporting from the Wall street journal on OpenAI and how they have been sitting on an AI detector that would be really, really effective, essentially watermarking their output. And they've been sitting on it, they have not released it. And you have to wonder why. You have to wonder and you have to imagine they know that students are using it. And in terms of building loyalty, you know, an AI detector might not be the best thing for the brand.

[Oracle Cloud Advertiser]

In business. They say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the Cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking better. In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com Vox that's oracle.com Vox.

[WhatsApp Advertiser]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] Race the Rudders.

[James Walsh]

Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.

[Sean Illing]

Over Roger, wait.

[James Walsh]

Is that an engine?

[Tech Domains Advertiser]

Enterprise Sales Solution Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started [e-mail] campaign terms and conditions apply.

[Sean Illing]

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 college?

[James Walsh]

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. So this tool in the hands of 18 year old me, I would have used it. That being said, I feel really good when I write now and the idea of stringing together words and ideas is really important to me and makes me feel good about Myself, and so 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, that they didn't sit down and struggle. And, you know, the idea of getting from a blank, blinking cursor to one page, even if that student's not going to go on to be a writer, is really important for their sense of self and their ability to think in complex, critical ways. And to lose that is really scary. And no, I certainly doubt I would be who I am and do what I do.

[Sean Illing]

Look, I mean, I. I will not judge any student who's doing this because I'm fairly certain I would have to if I had the option. However, I think it's really important that we not separate thinking and writing, because in so many ways, writing is thinking right. And for me, at least, it's very often I don't even know what I think and told them 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 ChatGPT was doing the work for me, that would not have happened. 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, certainly. And, yeah, that is what's so dispiriting to me about all of this right now. I'm sermonizing.

[James Walsh]

Well, no, I mean, 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 spellcheck, and other generations before me didn't have that. 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 differ. These.

[Sean Illing]

We're a long way from spell check.

[Tech Domains Advertiser]

Yes.

[Sean Illing]

All right. You mentioned the calculator, right? I mean, I. Which is a good time for me to ask the obligatory. 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. How do we know this isn't just another moral panic, one that might look silly in retrospect?

[James Walsh]

To be clear, this is my opinion. 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. It's not a generational moral panic. This is a tool that's available, and it's available to us just as it's available to students. Society and our culture will decide what the morals are. And that is changing and the way that the definition of cheating is changing. So who knows, it might be a moral panic today and it won't be in a year. However, I think somebody like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is one of the people who said this is a calculator for words. And I just don't really understand how that is compatible with other statements he's made about AI, you know, potentially being lights out for humanity, or statements made by people at Anthropic about the power of AI to potentially be a catastrophic event for humans. So, and these are the people who are closest and thinking about it the most. Of course, I have spoken to some people who say, you know, there is a possibility, and 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 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. But if that were the case, this.

[Sean Illing]

Is the worst it will ever be.

[James Walsh]

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.

[Sean Illing]

Just a calculator for words. That is nauseating. That hurts me in my heart, James.

[James Walsh]

And 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.

[Sean Illing]

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 we are just 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 post thinking.

[James Walsh]

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 the idea that my profession and what I'm doing is just feeding the machine, that my most important reader now is a robot 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 people thinking and engaging with these ideas. I think ideas can certainly, you know, be expressed in other mediums and that's exciting. But I don't think anybody who's paid attention to the way technology has changed and shaped teen brains over the past decade and decade and a half and think, yeah, we need more of that, you know, I think. And the technology we're talking about now are orders is like orders of magnitude more powerful than the algorithms on Instagram or whatever.

[Sean Illing]

Look, I'm just a lowly political theorist, so what do I know? But I do not believe there's a model of liberal democracy that works in a post literate society. Don't know one.

[James Walsh]

It's really scary.

[Sean Illing]

Yeah, maybe someone can invent one that's adapted to a society that can only think and communicate and speak and means. But that's not the one we have. And to get from the one we have to that one will probably be messy.

[James Walsh]

I don't want to think about that.

[Sean Illing]

I don't really know how to pivot from all of that heaviness, so I'll just do it. But it is a question I wanted to ask 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 do you think this might help in some way level the playing field? Is this something you thought much about?

[James Walsh]

Yeah, I mean, I thought about it a lot. In the context of education, you know, there are certainly really good use cases for AI in leveling the playing field. Right. As a writing tool, it can be extremely helpful for people writing it in their second or third language. It can be really helpful to create study guides for really dense material and put it in ways that are customized to your style of learning. That's really cool. In terms of how it could accelerate these inequalities, the idea that writing and thinking 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 anachronistic 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 think. And if that's the case, who's going to be able to afford to. To have those experiences?

[Sean Illing]

All right, James Walsh, the piece is outstanding. It is called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College. I highly recommend it. Go read it. Thanks for coming in, man.

[James Walsh]

Thanks, Sean. I enjoyed.

[Sean Illing]

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I think you can tell that I did. As always, we do want to know what you think. And I know at the end of every one of these episodes, I ask you to send me your thoughts, but just know that they really do mean a lot. I read every single note that we get. My team reads every single note that we get. And whether they're positive or negative, we try to learn from them. So just know I'm asking sincerely and it means a lot to us. You can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. And if you do that, once you're finished, go ahead and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. It really does help. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, Back check by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. Listen.

[James Walsh]

That's the sound of the fully electric Audi Q6E Tron. The sound of captivating electric performance, dynamic drive and the quiet confidence of ultra smooth handling. The elevated interior reminds you this is more than an EV. This is electrical performance. Redefined the fully electric Audi Q6 etron.