I think there's also an issue with what students consider to be the value of college. Many people believe (and college recruiters have marketed it as such) that a degree is a simple transaction. I give you $X and 4 years and you give me a diploma which multiplies my earnings and is supposed to pay itself off.
I think a lot of people recognize that you don't necessarily need college to perform well in a lot of jobs that require a degree.
This is unfortunate because I think there's a huge value to higher education and critical thinking, but a treating it as just another part of the market cheapens it beyond recognition.
“Just wanting the credential” still seems to support “Ease” as an explanation more than The Experience Machine. Especially since most people’s recollection of their uni experience isn’t just the essay writing or the test taking, and getting a degree based on cheating with AI seems a better route to easily acquiring a degree than to falsely creating the experience of having earned a degree.
Anyway, Ease is still the best and strongest explanation, but one factor you need to include is the Arms Race. If you write an essay yourself and all your peers save time and effort and produce something as-good-or-better, then you’re now at a disadvantage relative to your peers, and your success/marks will reflect this new distribution of performance. You hint at this with the PED analogy but then leave it aside.
Anyway. My thoughts, for what it’s worth. But I see people (academics/educators) who seem bafflingly credulous about the “potential unlocked” by AI and completely oblivious to the obvious cheating that it enables. Every essay and test now needs to be done in class sans electronics (and this should begin well before university). That is a tough sell, given parents who rip the arms off school administrators who want to take the phone out of Little Johnny’s clutches, but hopefully the tide turns soon.
At the moment at least, a trained reader really can tell AI text output— in the current generation of ChatGPT, it has a distinct writing style. I'm often able to recreate the prompt that created any given passage. It's bound to get more sophisticated, of course.
I think another reason students use it is because it does exactly what they've been trained to do most of their academic lives: churn out the expected, templated, cookie cutter answers. If students aren't inclined to be creative, curious, and cross-disciplinary eclectic thinkers, it's in part because those traits haven't been valued for most of their education.
Claude has a much more natural interaction style, but will still end most interactions with a question in order to prompt more input from the user, and like GPT still likes lists.
Even with gpt4 you can instruct the agent to copy your personal writing style by providing a sample text. Deepseek and o1 are even better. You probably are interacting with ai agents on social media without even realizing it - I develop such agents for clients & most users never notice
It's one thing to fool people with short posts and comments from strangers. Such strangers could naturally have a particularly generic style, who knows. But I can tell when someone splurges a giant chatgpt list into a reply. And I can tell when someone tries to use it to create narrative descriptions.
I've experimented trying to see if Deepseek can copy my style. As far as I can see, that's not something it can do very well. It still spaffs out generica just like ChatGPT would.
A challenge for most students is that their “creativity” is still crap :D so while we want to encourage free thinking and creative approaches to ideas, problems, etc - if you find you’re not actually all that brilliant it it does make sense to revert to the ol’ tried-and-true.
It depends on the domain, of course. I want medical students to have a firmer command of established procedure than philosophers.
But creative expression is like a muscle, it gets better the more its exercised. Not every student is going to be brilliant straight away, but it is something they can improve at.
What Norzic did not take into consideration is that we would live in a life in which Instant gratification would be the ultimate objective living a good life. What are we exposed to as gen Z? ‘Get in shape in 2 weeks’ ‘How to be a millionaire’ ‘Use AI to make money’ everything becomes so urgent! The pleasure has to come now. Look at the growth of maladaptive daydreaming amongst youth or the amount of people who watch people play video games and vlogs GRWM. It seems we have given up on reality and settled for the experience machine, as our reality has not materialised in our favour. This is something that urgently needs to be addressed
I don't think it's hedonism. I think that the dumbing down of the bachelors degree and the idea of 'university for all' which has turned the university into a new high school means that doing all the work yourself no longer transforms you into a wise scholar. Or an academic in training. When the majority of students think that the academic aspect of their university experience is a waste of time, it's no wonder they want to waste less of it to get the credential which they still need.
Hedonism may be true, but AI can't defeat Nozick because AI doesn't offer the experience of anything (at least not yet). It's more a description machine than an experience machine.
Or maybe it's a convenience machine, and what it really shows is that the deep cut isn't reality/simulation but hard/easy.
AI is an experience machine in its infancy. It offers a means of having the experience of academic achievement (you get good grades, a degree, etc.) without actually doing anything to earn that achievement. It is the simulacrum of education.
Nobody who’s glad their team won the Super Bowl thinks they played on the field or even talks about it as if they did. (It seems you’re taking the use of “we” to imply that sports fans genuinely think they had a role in the success, which is not the case. But perhaps I misunderstand.)
Of course. But they still feel like they had a success, that they shared in the victory. That's why they watch the game, isn't it?
(And I'm not so sure no one talks about it as if they did. You've never heard anyone say "we scored with less than a minute to go to tie the game...." Or "we've got a pretty good shot at the playoffs this season...." Or "I hope we beat the Cowboys tomorrow...."?)
They are watching in the game, identifying with the team, participating in the victory vicariously - not as a second-best option, but as the preferred option.
Surely that's the sort of person who is at least experience-machine-curious.
Cheering for your team and having them win is already its own authentic experience - that of fandom. Nobody thinks that by supporting the winning team they have had the experience of literally being on the field. They accurately have experienced the elation of their team - their community - achieving a victory. There’s nothing fake about it because the experience is quite literally what’s on the label.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the main thesis, I can identify with a lot of those. I've been using AI on university for some time for all of those reasons, but I'm intending to stop before it's too late for my brain.
Your argument that student AI cheating is evidence against Nozick misunderstands why a lot of people go to college. Many people do not want to go to college because they value becoming a learned scholar. They do it because they believe a degree will give them better career opportunities in the future. A successful career (or the money it brings) is their true goal. College is an instrumental goal, not a terminal one.
Students are not cheating because they want the experience of being a learned and brilliant scholar without being a learned and brilliant scholars. They are cheating because they don't care about the experience being a scholar at all. It's just a means to the end of getting the experience they are actually after, being wealthy and/or successful.
I'm not saying that they prefer the fake experience of education. I am saying they don't care about the experience of education at all, real or fake. It is only a means to an end.
I think there's also an issue with what students consider to be the value of college. Many people believe (and college recruiters have marketed it as such) that a degree is a simple transaction. I give you $X and 4 years and you give me a diploma which multiplies my earnings and is supposed to pay itself off.
I think a lot of people recognize that you don't necessarily need college to perform well in a lot of jobs that require a degree.
This is unfortunate because I think there's a huge value to higher education and critical thinking, but a treating it as just another part of the market cheapens it beyond recognition.
“Just wanting the credential” still seems to support “Ease” as an explanation more than The Experience Machine. Especially since most people’s recollection of their uni experience isn’t just the essay writing or the test taking, and getting a degree based on cheating with AI seems a better route to easily acquiring a degree than to falsely creating the experience of having earned a degree.
Anyway, Ease is still the best and strongest explanation, but one factor you need to include is the Arms Race. If you write an essay yourself and all your peers save time and effort and produce something as-good-or-better, then you’re now at a disadvantage relative to your peers, and your success/marks will reflect this new distribution of performance. You hint at this with the PED analogy but then leave it aside.
Anyway. My thoughts, for what it’s worth. But I see people (academics/educators) who seem bafflingly credulous about the “potential unlocked” by AI and completely oblivious to the obvious cheating that it enables. Every essay and test now needs to be done in class sans electronics (and this should begin well before university). That is a tough sell, given parents who rip the arms off school administrators who want to take the phone out of Little Johnny’s clutches, but hopefully the tide turns soon.
At the moment at least, a trained reader really can tell AI text output— in the current generation of ChatGPT, it has a distinct writing style. I'm often able to recreate the prompt that created any given passage. It's bound to get more sophisticated, of course.
I think another reason students use it is because it does exactly what they've been trained to do most of their academic lives: churn out the expected, templated, cookie cutter answers. If students aren't inclined to be creative, curious, and cross-disciplinary eclectic thinkers, it's in part because those traits haven't been valued for most of their education.
Claude has a much more natural interaction style, but will still end most interactions with a question in order to prompt more input from the user, and like GPT still likes lists.
Even with gpt4 you can instruct the agent to copy your personal writing style by providing a sample text. Deepseek and o1 are even better. You probably are interacting with ai agents on social media without even realizing it - I develop such agents for clients & most users never notice
It's one thing to fool people with short posts and comments from strangers. Such strangers could naturally have a particularly generic style, who knows. But I can tell when someone splurges a giant chatgpt list into a reply. And I can tell when someone tries to use it to create narrative descriptions.
I've experimented trying to see if Deepseek can copy my style. As far as I can see, that's not something it can do very well. It still spaffs out generica just like ChatGPT would.
A challenge for most students is that their “creativity” is still crap :D so while we want to encourage free thinking and creative approaches to ideas, problems, etc - if you find you’re not actually all that brilliant it it does make sense to revert to the ol’ tried-and-true.
It depends on the domain, of course. I want medical students to have a firmer command of established procedure than philosophers.
But creative expression is like a muscle, it gets better the more its exercised. Not every student is going to be brilliant straight away, but it is something they can improve at.
What Norzic did not take into consideration is that we would live in a life in which Instant gratification would be the ultimate objective living a good life. What are we exposed to as gen Z? ‘Get in shape in 2 weeks’ ‘How to be a millionaire’ ‘Use AI to make money’ everything becomes so urgent! The pleasure has to come now. Look at the growth of maladaptive daydreaming amongst youth or the amount of people who watch people play video games and vlogs GRWM. It seems we have given up on reality and settled for the experience machine, as our reality has not materialised in our favour. This is something that urgently needs to be addressed
I don't think it's hedonism. I think that the dumbing down of the bachelors degree and the idea of 'university for all' which has turned the university into a new high school means that doing all the work yourself no longer transforms you into a wise scholar. Or an academic in training. When the majority of students think that the academic aspect of their university experience is a waste of time, it's no wonder they want to waste less of it to get the credential which they still need.
Hedonism may be true, but AI can't defeat Nozick because AI doesn't offer the experience of anything (at least not yet). It's more a description machine than an experience machine.
Or maybe it's a convenience machine, and what it really shows is that the deep cut isn't reality/simulation but hard/easy.
AI is an experience machine in its infancy. It offers a means of having the experience of academic achievement (you get good grades, a degree, etc.) without actually doing anything to earn that achievement. It is the simulacrum of education.
That’s like saying that hiring someone to run a marathon for you is a simulacrum of running.
Right. Or like saying that "your team" winning the Super Bowl is a simulacrum of victory. Why would anyone celebrate that?
Nobody who’s glad their team won the Super Bowl thinks they played on the field or even talks about it as if they did. (It seems you’re taking the use of “we” to imply that sports fans genuinely think they had a role in the success, which is not the case. But perhaps I misunderstand.)
Of course. But they still feel like they had a success, that they shared in the victory. That's why they watch the game, isn't it?
(And I'm not so sure no one talks about it as if they did. You've never heard anyone say "we scored with less than a minute to go to tie the game...." Or "we've got a pretty good shot at the playoffs this season...." Or "I hope we beat the Cowboys tomorrow...."?)
They are watching in the game, identifying with the team, participating in the victory vicariously - not as a second-best option, but as the preferred option.
Surely that's the sort of person who is at least experience-machine-curious.
Cheering for your team and having them win is already its own authentic experience - that of fandom. Nobody thinks that by supporting the winning team they have had the experience of literally being on the field. They accurately have experienced the elation of their team - their community - achieving a victory. There’s nothing fake about it because the experience is quite literally what’s on the label.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the main thesis, I can identify with a lot of those. I've been using AI on university for some time for all of those reasons, but I'm intending to stop before it's too late for my brain.
Your argument that student AI cheating is evidence against Nozick misunderstands why a lot of people go to college. Many people do not want to go to college because they value becoming a learned scholar. They do it because they believe a degree will give them better career opportunities in the future. A successful career (or the money it brings) is their true goal. College is an instrumental goal, not a terminal one.
Students are not cheating because they want the experience of being a learned and brilliant scholar without being a learned and brilliant scholars. They are cheating because they don't care about the experience being a scholar at all. It's just a means to the end of getting the experience they are actually after, being wealthy and/or successful.
Right—students are hedonists who prefer the fake experience of becoming educated and cheating is a means to that end. That *is* my thesis!
I'm not saying that they prefer the fake experience of education. I am saying they don't care about the experience of education at all, real or fake. It is only a means to an end.