For Those About To Cheat…
Warning: this is another post about that thing. If you’re sick of hearing about it, either because you hate it to its very core, or because you love it and don’t want to feel bad about using it, well, you’ve been warned.
Another warning (for the first group): I’m not going to bash it altogether. I concede that it has its place. I do cringe at the ridiculous amounts of otherwise useful water it goes through, and the greenspace it usurps. I’m not at all happy about the big bucks that are being funnelled into it either, the billions that could be put to better use.
But if we’re going to insist on keeping it around, maybe we at least do so with our eyes wide open. This is basically how I view any new tech. For this bit I’m putting on my teacher hat, and will be digging into our interest in using it at school, specifically, to cheat.
Generally speaking, educators frown upon cheating because:
a) it gives extra advantages to some learners, and makes it difficult to maintain a fair and equitable learning environment.
b) it’s disrespectful to the person doing evaluation inasmuch as they’re forced to spend time and resources on something other than teaching (i.e. chasing down and arguing with cheaters).
c) it makes it nearly impossible to tell how much someone has actually learned, and what they’re capable of.
That last one is really big. It’s the sticky wicket.
Let’s not fool ourselves and say things like “these kids today”. Cheating is as old as education itself, and there are many ways to do it, including low-tech options. I’ve dealt with many different brands of it, some of them very creative, and some of them outright annoying and disappointing.
It should also be acknowledged that there are many, many motivations for cheating, and most of them don’t have anything to do with being evil or bothersome. Learners are human, and as such, they feel tired, desperate, underconfident, and a host of other things. I’ve never felt like any learner cheated because they wanted to show off, or figuratively flip off their instructor.
Regardless, when a learner hands in work they didn’t do, there’s no way to assess how far they’ve come, or what else they need in order to get where they need to go. You can’t celebrate achievements that aren’t theirs, and you can’t fix problems that aren’t identified. If a teacher is going to assess and evaluate AI-generated work, they might as well be assessing and evaluating the windowsills.
Cheating with AI cheats the teacher out of time and resources that could have been better spent on learners who actually want to learn. Even worse, it means a learner has cheated themselves out of any expertise or guidance the person at the front of the room might be able to give them. If it’s in the public system, they’ve wasted what’s available for free, and if it’s somewhere else, they’ve made sure they can’t possibly get what they paid for.
Right. But what if you aren’t a student anymore, at least not in a formal sense? Is it still cheating to use AI to work, or to run your personal life? I’d propose that the same definitions and standards of cheating with AI follow us outside of the classroom. In work and in life, it’s cheating with AI if it prevents others from knowing whether you actually understand what you’re doing. It’s cheating if it gets in the way of you learning something, or developing skills. It’s cheating if it means you can’t identify gaps in knowledge or do anything to fill them.
So many of our pursuits as humans, before, during and after formal schooling, are all about learning about the world, processing what we’ve found, and explaining it to others. AI-generated art stings because art is all about exploring the world, expressing what it’s like to be human. So is science. So are literature and music and food and relationships and community…the list goes on. It sucks that we’re cheating at that, that we’ve put ourselves in a position where we can’t “show our work”, just an empty final answer. It sucks that we’re denying everyone else the opportunity to learn from our authentic lived experiences.
Yeah, I know everyone else is probably doing it. AI makes it likely that someone will get places faster, get recognized first, get praised for their efficiency. People kind of suck right now, and I’m sorry about that. You can choose to let the tide of suckiness take you out, or you can swim against it. It has been, and will ever be thus.
To be honest, not everything we do with AI is necessarily cheating. Is it cheating to ask for help staying organized? Nope. We’ve been using all kinds of tech for that, for quite some time. Is it cheating to admit we don’t know something and we need to look it up? Nope again. There’s an awful lot to know, and we are all of limited brain. AI is pretty good at scheduling, task management, pinpointing problems, and suggesting alternatives, though it has been known to cave in on itself and start spouting nonsense. Gotta watch out for that one.
But if you are in the midst of an activity or task that poses the essential question “Who are you, what are you like, and what are you capable of?” and you proceed to hammer a bunch of prompts into a machine, and submit whatever comes out, that’s pretty crappy. It’s crappy for you, a being whose future success hinges on being able to think, understand, and communicate. You can’t farm the really good stuff out and expect to grow. It’s crappy to the rest of the world too. How many people around you might not ever know how amazing you are, what problems you may be capable of solving, what insights you could provide, and how you might connect and work together?
In the classroom, you can deter learners from cheating with all kinds of penalties. You can change the way you teach, give different kinds of assignments, and have lengthy conversations about why it’s not fair to anyone. You can make it clear how much you value a learner’s actual thoughts, and how you just want to see them succeed.
I don’t know the full extent of penalties for cheating in “the real world”, but I’d wager there aren’t enough in place. If you need AI for the logistics of functioning, fine, but if we don’t start placing greater value on our own and each other’s actual thoughts, and genuinely wanting each other to succeed, it’s just going to be crappy.
*Just in case you were wondering, I wrote this whole darn thing myself.