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- [00:01]
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- [00:33]
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- [01:04]
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. 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 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.
- [03:04]
James Walsh
Thank you for having me.
- [03:06]
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?
- [03:30]
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're. They don't think it's cheating. It's just everywhere. And it's like bending the very definition of cheating.
- [04:02]
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.
- [04:10]
James Walsh
I did talk. Yeah, I talked to students who were like, oh, the kind of old, old school cheating. The tradecraft is still there. Whether it's people using Apple watches to pull up PDFs or scribbling something on the palm of their hands. As one student said to me, it's like the floor of cheating is still there. It's just that the ceiling's been blown off.
- [04:34]
Sean Illing
I'm both elated and bummed that I missed the golden age.
- [04:41]
James Walsh
I would go back and forth. Yeah, I use SparkNotes, of course. Every once in a while I peek at Sparks notes. I'm actually very glad that I didn't have this tool when I was in college.
- [04:52]
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?
- [05:17]
James Walsh
The reporting process for finding these 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 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 like, I have done a 180. We need to get AI out of the classroom. And that 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.
- [07:13]
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?
- [07:40]
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 anthropics, 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.
- [09:31]
Sean Illing
Have they realized that if they're using the chatbots to code that they actually won't be needed as coders?
- [09:37]
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 he has had conversations with executives at these tech companies who ask him, why would I hire a coder now anyway? And we see that in the workforce. Right. I think Microsoft just laid off a ton of coders.
- [10:14]
Sean Illing
Do they feel that when they're told that hey look, 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?
- [10:26]
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.
- [11:32]
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?
- [11:54]
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 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 and mention broccoli, mention dua lipa, say something about Finland into their prompts, 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.
- [13:03]
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.
- [13:19]
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 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, they're assigned 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.
- [14:28]
Sean Illing
Well, it reduces everyone to editors, right? You're just going in there and manipulating the language that the machine gives you.
- [14:35]
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, what does your writer, what does the future of writing look like? It probably looks a lot more like editing. And he admitted that.
- [15:03]
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?
- [15:13]
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, you know, I realized AI was a problem when I would walk in, started last fall, walking into the library and fully, you know, at least half of the students were using ChatGPT. And it was at that moment that she sort of started thinking about her classroom discussion, discussions and some of the peer reviewed essays she was reading and students were, you know, 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. 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 the 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 you know, we go to school to learn how to be efficient. And you know, this is sort of, as one student put it, you know, a hackable assignment. So I might as well use it to hack.
- [17:06]
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?
- [17:26]
James Walsh
Sure. Roy is somebody who just has always known he wants to be a founder 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, like, why would you go through so much effort? You know, 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.
- [18:33]
Sean Illing
It does kind of give the game away a little bit. Right. I mean, going to college, it's. Get out of here with this business about, you know, learning.
- [18:41]
James Walsh
Right.
- [18:41]
Sean Illing
It's just, it's a networking activity.
- [18:44]
James Walsh
Right. And, and, 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 as this place. Yeah. Where you just go to, to. To grow intellectually is, Is long gone.
- [19:03]
Sean Illing
Yeah. No, I. Look, I. It makes me a little sad, but I respect the game. I respect the honesty.
- [19:08]
James Walsh
Sure, sure. Yeah.
- [19:10]
Sean Illing
I mean, was that a pretty common perspective among students, especially at the more elite universities?
- [19:16]
James Walsh
You know, I wouldn't say it was common with the students I spoke to, but those students often sort of talked derisively, 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, for, for networking.
- [19:43]
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. To justify that or if that's the wrong word, what was her explanation?
- [20:04]
James Walsh
I think Wendy was sort of the best example, kind of spoke to a lot of students. Experiences where, you know, 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 Documents 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 did. She just didn't feel like it was cheating at all.
- [21:30]
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. I can't.
- [22:01]
James Walsh
Right.
- [22:01]
Sean Illing
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, you know, or go to the ball game or whatever. You know, it's, it's asking a lot. It's asking a lot of students to, to not partake.
- [22:19]
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 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 this story, I played with it a lot more to familiarize myself with it. And it was like the first time I realized, oh, if I had two paragraphs and needed a transition and I couldn't come up with 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. 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, like you said, you know, they, they have clubs to be at or they have, you know, as one student put me sometimes an essay just Needs to get read or something, you know.
- [23:34]
Sean Illing
Yeah, touche.
- [23:35]
James Walsh
Yeah.
- [23:38]
Sean Illing
I'm just curious, did you. Did any of Wendy or anyone else share some other essays with you? Did you get a chance to look at it? Were they good? Were they convincing? Would they have fooled you?
- [23:49]
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 like, 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.
- [24:54]
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 prompt engineering is just going to be the new writing and better to figure that out now so you.
- [25:12]
James Walsh
Can adapt, I don't know, I can't really speak at all to the nuances 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, anybody can do that. So I don't really understand when people talk about teaching students to use AI in the arts or humanities. I. I still don't really know what that looks like.
- [26:09]
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- [27:25]
James Walsh
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- [27:54]
Sean Illing
Support for the show comes from Bombas. You know those songs that make you just want to run. Maybe you're in the middle of a workout and you're totally spent, but then that one track hits. Maybe it's Tool, maybe it's a little Wu Tang and boom, you're back. That's kind of like what BOMBA socks do. You put them on and you're ready to go. This summer you can get moving with Bombas socks specially designed to wick, sweat, keep you cool and prevent blisters. You probably know I've tried out Bombas for myself. They are my favorite socks. In the winter and fall. I rock their wool socks because I wear boots a lot and they're super thick but still breathable now that it's 500 degrees down here on the Gulf Coast. My go to socks are their lightweight athletic socks. They are comfortable and they really do keep you cool and dry. You can head over to bombas.com and use code gray area for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S.com code gray area at checkout. That's bombus.com code gray area at checkout. Let's talk about the professor perspective. I mean, the professors you spoke to all seem to share something pretty close to despair.
- [29:27]
James Walsh
Yes, those are primarily the professors in writing heavy classes or computer science classes. You know, there were professors who I spoke to who actually were really, you know, 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 the 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 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.
- [31:25]
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.
- [32:08]
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 this 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, 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 has 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.
- [33:50]
Sean Illing
What does he think is lost?
- [33:52]
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 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.
- [34:28]
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.
- [34:54]
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.
- [35:01]
Sean Illing
Or.
- [35:03]
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 kind of show the thinking.
- [35:13]
Sean Illing
How many professors do you think now are just having AI write all their lectures?
- [35:18]
James Walsh
You know, there's been a little reporting 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.
- [36:22]
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. But was that a pretty common level of demoralization in your reporting?
- [36:36]
James Walsh
I spoke to another couple professors who are like, 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. I just don't think people outside of academia realize what a seismic change is coming. 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 said, you know, 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.
- [37:30]
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?
- [37:49]
James Walsh
I mean, I want to give administrators more credit than that.
- [37:53]
Sean Illing
I don't.
- [37:54]
James Walsh
You don't. I mean, I guess 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.
- [38:41]
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?
- [39:53]
James Walsh
No, I, I don't. I don't.
- [39:54]
Sean Illing
You can punt.
- [39:55]
James Walsh
No, no, I, I genuinely don't think that that's 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. TA is 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. It's sort of like turn a blind eye to it. And that is one of the ways AI is challenging, kind of like exposing the rot underneath education. It's just this system that hasn't been updated in forever. And, and in the case of kind of the US's educational, higher. 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.
- [41:13]
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.
- [41:33]
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 build 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 know, you have to imagine they know that students are using it. And in terms of building loyalty, you know, an AI director might not be the best thing for the brand.
- [43:13]
Sean Illing
Support for the Gray Area comes From another podcast August 2025 it's been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina. Where the Schools Went is a new five part podcast series about what happened to the schools in New Orleans after the levees broke and how it led to the most radical education education experiment in American history. Hosted by Ravi Gupta, a former school principal, where the School Went traces the decades of dysfunction before Katrina and the high stakes decisions that followed. On the podcast you'll hear from veteran educators who lost their jobs, idealists and outsiders who rushed in after the storm, and students and families who lived through it all. From the branch in partnership with A74 and Midas Touch, where the Schools Went is out now. Wherever you get your podcasts, support for today's show comes from GiveWell. You might have read news on some of the massive cuts happening to foreign aid, and with everything going on, it might be hard to know what's actually happening or even how to help. Givewhale doesn't claim to have all the answers, but for the past 18 years the nonprofit research organization says they have helped guide more than 130,000 donors and $2.5 billion to highly cost effective aid. They really do terrific work. The researchers are analyzing the impact of the cuts to USAID in real time and sharing what they're learning through research updates, grant write ups and candid podcast conversations. This information is free and for everyone. GiveWell says they have already committed tens of millions of dollars in response to this year's cuts and their researchers are working to forecast, find and fund other new cost effective needs. For trusted evidence backed insights into this evolving situation and information about how you can help, follow along@givewell.org USAID.
- [45:19]
James Walsh
She'S made up her mind to live pretty smart, learn to budget responsibly right from the start. She spends a little less and puts more into savings. Keeps her blood pressure low and credit score. Raises scurten debt right out of her life.
- [45:40]
Sean Illing
She tracks her cash.
- [45:43]
James Walsh
Boring money moves.
- [45:43]
Sean Illing
Make kind of lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet.
- [45:46]
James Walsh
BNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865.
- [46:01]
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 in college.
- [46:27]
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 18, in the hands of 18 year old me, you know, 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 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, and their ability to think in complex critical ways and to lose that is really scary. And no, I certainly, I doubt I would be who I am and do what I do.
- [48:09]
Sean Illing
Look, I mean, I will not judge any student who's doing this because I'm, I'm fairly certain I would have too 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 until 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 Chad GPT 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. All right, now I'm sermonizing.
- [49:24]
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. I grew up with spellcheck and other generations before me didn't have that. And just fundamentally, I say to these people, do you not understand the difference between a little squiggly line between after a dangling modifier and something that's generating ideas and summarizing the books that you were supposed to have spent the past two weeks reading? Of course there's a difference between these books.
- [50:00]
Sean Illing
We're a long way from spell check.
- [50:01]
James Walsh
Yes.
- [50:04]
Sean Illing
All right. You mentioned the calculator, right?
- [50:06]
James Walsh
I mean, I.
- [50:08]
Sean Illing
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?
- [50:32]
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 potentially being lights out for humanity, or statements made by people at an anthropic about the power of AI to potentially be a catastrophic event for humans. And these are the people who are closest and thinking about it the most. Of course, I have spoken to some people who say there is a possibility, and I think there are people who use AI who would back this up, that we've kind of maxed out the AI's potential to supplement essays or writing that it might not get much better than it is now. And I think that would be a very long shot and one that I would not want to bank on. But if that were the case, this.
- [52:18]
Sean Illing
Is the worst it will ever be.
- [52:20]
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.
- [52:27]
Sean Illing
Just a calculator for words. That is nauseating. That hurts me in my heart, James.
- [52:36]
James Walsh
And I Think it's more likely, I don't know, this idea of, I'm interested in this idea of the kind of post literate world and if that's, if we're on that highway.
- [52:47]
Sean Illing
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, 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.
- [53:19]
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, you know, my profession and what I'm doing is just feeding the machine, that like my, 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 has 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, and the technology we're talking about now are orders, is like orders of magnitude more powerful than the algorithms on Instagram or whatever.
- [54:29]
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.
- [54:42]
James Walsh
Scary.
- [54:44]
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.
- [54:59]
James Walsh
Yeah, I don't want to think about that.
- [55:01]
Sean Illing
Yeah, yeah, 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?
- [55:32]
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 in their second or third language. It can be really helpful to create study guides for really dense material and, you know, 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. I put a line in about it becoming that writing will be an anachronistic elective, like basket weaving. It's like it's going to be only for people who go to this certain school or can afford 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 have those experiences?
- [56:46]
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.
- [56:58]
James Walsh
Thanks, Sean. I enjoyed it.
- [57:08]
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. Fact Checked 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.