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.
I agree, but I would add that students did not invent this transactional view of college on their own. For decades, universities, employers, lenders, and policymakers have framed higher education as an investment whose value is measured mainly by future earnings. Once college is sold as a market transaction, students understandably begin to judge it like one. The tragedy is that the real value of higher education — intellectual formation, critical judgment, exposure to difficulty, learning how to think with and against others — is precisely what becomes hardest to defend in market terms. AI may intensify this problem by making the credential seem even more detached from actual competence. The question, then, is not simply whether college “pays off,” but whether we can still describe education as something more than employability.
Perhaps colleges need to become a little more like monasteries again: not in the religious sense, but as places set apart from the immediate logic of the market. A university should not merely certify employability; it should protect time, attention, and difficult thought from the demand to become instantly useful.
“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.
Agreed, it’s really not that complicated, most don’t value learning - at least not for the vast majority of their coursework - and don’t have a moral objection to using AI even if it’s considered cheating. (I just realized this was a post from a few months ago)
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 Ghatanathoah is right in this case. Students didn't want a fake experience. If I could skip college and get the same job (and save tens of thousands of dollars), I absolutely would have. I learned 90% of what I needed to do my job in high school. I took 3 classes that made me a better programmer. Just three! If I could take those classes and and get the same degree, I would. (Although filling my entire 4 years with useful classes would have been better.) The rest were classes repeating things I already knew and "making me a more well rounded student" aka, the university wanted more money out of me.
If you knew all my classmates were getting better grades on classes you didn't care about by cheating... And by cheating you could pull fewer all nighters on classes you actually cared about... Wouldn't you be tempted to cheat?
No, sorry, you’re wrong: as a past student, I didn’t want a fake (or genuine) experience of becoming educated per se; I just wanted the degree so that I could start my career sooner!
I think that we can safely assume that different students want different things out of college. Many probably - as you say - simply want the degree, as a merit useful to get a job. Others want to learn things, or even have the experience of learning. Some want the experience of hanging out in student bars. Etc.
I also suspect that there is a difference between what students want when they sit down and think about it and plan their future, and what they want when they choose if they are going to study, or spend this particular evening with their friends. Traditional moral philosophers call this 'temptation'. Short term choices often conflict with long term wishes, even when a person can make the choice entirely freely.
Personally, I enjoyed studying most of the time - but certainly not all the time - and then I ended up teaching in a university. I am aware that not all students think like I did.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that the potential benefits of AI outweigh the crushing damage it will do to human cognitive abilities by obviating the need for humans to develop and maintain skills. I talk to highly sophisticated investors in this space, and even they have moments of concern along these lines. The worst case scenarios along these lines could not be more dire. Hope I’m wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A brutal, clever, and provocative essay that blends academic philosophy, psychology, and cultural critique into a bleak but compelling theory: students cheat with AI not just because they’re lazy or stressed—but because they’ve subconsciously chosen illusion over effort, simulation over substance. It’s saying: Nozick was wrong. We want the lie.
That’s chilling. And brilliant. But it’s not without its flaws.
🧠 Intellectual Strengths
1. The Philosophical Framing is Strong
The Nozick “Experience Machine” metaphor is a perfect backbone for this argument. It gives the piece conceptual depth beyond the usual “kids these days” narrative. It’s not just about cheating—it's about identity, integrity, authenticity. And the idea that AI is now a mass-produced, plug-and-play Experience Machine? Genuinely haunting.
2. Multi-layered Explanation of Cheating
Instead of relying solely on the tired "students are lazy" trope, it gives:
Psychological (akrasia, hyperbolic discounting)
Structural (ease of AI)
Philosophical (desire for illusion over reality) This builds toward a conclusion that cheating isn’t just expedient—it’s existential.
3. Sarcastic Tone Works Better Here
The piece leans into a dark humor that’s more pointed than in the “Average Student” piece. The dioxygen difluoride metaphor? Over-the-top but memorable. The dig at Claude’s AI safety reply? Funny and insightful—it shows the disconnect between AI ethics and lived human behavior.
⚠️ Weaknesses / Problem Areas
1. Hedonism = Truth? Nah.
The final leap—"hedonism is true, Nozick was wrong, students prefer illusion"—is bold, but reductive. It’s not that students consciously choose illusion; it's more that they are incentivized, trained, and nudged into it by decades of institutional and cultural conditioning.
Most students don’t want to cheat. They don’t wake up thinking “I’d rather be a fake person.” They do it because:
They’re overwhelmed
They lack the confidence or scaffolding
The system doesn’t reward authenticity, only credentials
They don’t even realize what’s being lost
So the framing risks being too cynical, even if it’s rhetorically potent.
✅ Better conclusion: students are being gradually trained to prefer the Experience Machine because it mimics reward without effort—rather than them explicitly preferring it.
2. It skirts institutional and economic realities
Again, like the first essay, this one focuses almost entirely on the moral/philosophical failing of students, with little examination of:
Why students don’t value learning (e.g., cost of living, debt, job market anxiety)
How universities have become commodified, outcome-driven businesses
How adjunctification and bureaucratization have gutted mentorship
The Experience Machine might be part of the answer, but it’s not the only machine at work.
3. It leaves no exit strategy
This essay, like the first, offers no solutions or even hope. It’s compelling as a diagnosis, but if you’re a teacher, student, or administrator, what now? The answer can’t just be: “give up, it’s all fake.”
🎯 Notable Quotes & Commentary
"Writing is not a tool to express our thoughts—the act of writing is the act of thinking."
Yes. This is one of the truest and most important lines in the essay. If writing is offloaded, thinking is offloaded—and that does erode the soul. But this insight could have been its own essay—philosophically expanded, pedagogically engaged.
"Pretending to have earned a degree. They are hedonists abjuring the development of the self."
Strong, but dangerously totalizing. Some students still care. Many are caught between forces.
“We have to give grades, and grades are a kind of testimony.”
Great epistemological moment. Worth expanding. Grades as testimony introduces a moral obligation often ignored in grading discourse.
📚 Literary + Stylistic Notes
Voice: Witty, confident, jaded but still intellectually engaged.
Structure: Clear progression—starts with the scale of cheating, explores coping strategies, diagnoses deeper roots, lands with the Experience Machine as synthesis.
Style: Punchy, metaphor-rich, quotable. Could be trimmed by 15% for conciseness.
Conclusion
This essay is stronger than the “Average Student” piece. It frames the cheating crisis not as a moral failing or laziness epidemic, but as a philosophical symptom of a society that increasingly prefers appearance over reality. That’s profound.
But it overstates its case. Students aren’t purely hedonists. They’re people trapped in a gamified credential economy. The Experience Machine metaphor is powerful—but incomplete without a systems critique.
Still, this piece deserves to be widely read in academia. It's a fire alarm that actually tries to explain why the fire started—not just complain about the smoke.
That's just good old GPT. They are surprisingly good at textual analysis. To be completely honest, I am both terrified and inspired by what GPT produce after certain types of training.. The AI detection tools are very easy to circumvent. I mean, you can simply ask the AI to rewrite in a way that would not be detected by them. Human tendencies will lead to doing everything by AI right up until it causes everything to collapse. Humans are special creatures.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. I certainly believe that "writing is the act of thinking." But the game of school (I’m a high school educator) has caused teachers to expect student essays that look a certain way (e.g., traditional 5-paragraph structure; claim-evidence-reasoning), rather than rewarding an exploration of thought.
I think young people want authentic experiences in life. But they might not see my classroom, or the writing assignments I give, as worthy of their full presence. After all, they might find that, if they commit to it in a genuine way, they might spend a lot of effort and fail in the end. Because the diploma is what matters, not the knowledge, it’s better to make sure they succeed.
This is sobering and sad and I see it in my high school classroom daily. We are in trouble not because AI exists, but because these younger humans don’t care to learn, grow, wrestle, and labor with thoughts and ideas. They want the easiest path to the pretend accomplishment. Watching students graduate when you know they can’t write a coherent paragraph about any topic is heartbreaking. And the fact that my hands are tied and I am forced to allow that to happen makes it even worse. All these alarms and yet no one is listening….
I work with writers who teach create writing. I believe that making more room for creative/imaginative writing is the antidote to AI academic writing. Sure, a student can get AI to write them a poem or story, but when students are taught to value writing as a process of discovery, deemphasizing the final product, I think the incentive to use AI will be less, and the inspiration to tell their own truth in their own voices will be greater. Instead of an analytic essay, assignments could be creative, project-based, and personal. When students feel their personal voices are valued, they will write.
I read this a while back, and I am deciding to come back to it and share my thoughts. The reality from what I have seen as an undergrad student is that most students simply do not value education at all -- not even as a concept. Students who offload high level analysis to AI whenever possible without a hint of remorse do so because they view a degree and an education as two distinctly separate entities, and they only desire the former. Because they understand how easy it is to acquire the degree using AI while avoiding meaningful punishment, they bypass the actual education to obtain that certification. It is false, but they don't care because they are so anxious about their future financial stability -- and can you really blame them? "Don't hate the player", they'll tell you, “Hate the game!" The system (late-stage capitalism) is cold to them, so when they find a loophole, they will use it shamelessly. So many of my fellow students (especially at the school I go to since it is very pre-professional) see a degree as a monetary investment: give some money now to acquire a more lucrative career and earn it back later. A lot of them are deeply insecure about their abilities and worry that they will not be able to get as high of an ROI without using AI to fraudulently achieve higher grades. I don't even think they care about what the degree represents or the perception of being an educated scholar. It's all just about money, which is why they don't even try to hide their cheating from one another, sometimes even being proud of it. If college made one appear educated but didn't improve financial outcomes and hold cultural capital (to be converted back to economic capital), we wouldn't see cheating; we'd just see universities' enrollment plummet.
I agree with your assertion that students' indifference toward becoming self-actualized, educated individuals is the root of the AI problem, and I think it needs to be addressed at every step of a child's development in the classroom. However, placing this responsibility on teachers to cultivate critical thinking would be futile because there is only so much they can do, as anti-intellectualism is systematically perpetuated by the economic structure we are subject to. In a late-stage capitalist society, every aspect of your livelihood is saying that you need to WORK to earn MONEY to be HAPPY and thinking is wasting time because you aren't producing anything. ChatGPT can produce words 1000x faster than you, and in a society that lauds productivity and places efficiency on a pedestal, the purity of the obtainment process is irrelevant. Only the end product matters, so it's okay for intellectual labor to be outsourced to AI! This societal mindset is conditioning students to use AI to cheat. I don't necessarily think they are pleasure-seeking hedonists; they are just a product of their environment and the values it instills in them. I resonate with the experience machine metaphor, but it places a bit too much blame on the students for my liking. Their indifference toward education -- both as an actual experience and even as a concept -- is more of a reflection of a faulty economic system than an indication of individual moral failings.
Honestly, the pervasive anti-intellectualism among my demographic just makes me sad and dejected. I love being a student, and I hate the way college is marketed to teens now, and I hate that sometimes I find myself falling for it because it's impossible not to feel anxious about the future when the job market gets worse every year. I don't want to end up in poverty because I was too self-righteous to use AI in college! I know that jumping to this dichotomy is catastrophizing and a reflection of my anxieties, which I am not alone in feeling, but all students are placed in the age-old ethical dilemma that forces us to (at least to some degree) choose between money and morals. Everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum, and I am not going to sit on a high horse and judge those who waver toward the other side because it's not our fault that we were forced to make this choice in the first place. It does become difficult to maintain this self-control when the benefits are so intangible, and I am being pushed to give in constantly by every facet of my life. When I am writing an essay, and my friend who used AI gets a better grade then me, I am going to be upset. Despite my frustration, I still won't abuse AI because I value the truthful process of education too much, and I know I would only be doing myself a disservice in the long run. However, I will not judge those who do too harshly because I understand how they feel, and I slip up sometimes too (but from panic cheating). I hate that society makes students feel like they need to forgo intellectual fulfillment to evade poverty, even if this belief is overstated. I hate that society makes them feel like there is nothing more to life than the mindless 9-5, crunching numbers for businesses instead of chasing passion. I know there is hope for the youth because I am full of it, but still, it makes me sad. Thanks for writing this! It definitely made me think.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. While it's true that everyone has to get a job eventually and become self-supporting, getting a job is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. I think "chase your passion or starve to death" is a false dichotomy. Life doesn't have to be a mindless death march of chasing a dollar; people confuse working for a living with living to work. As far as who is to blame, something I'm not terribly interested in, I'll say this: people are responsible for forging their own souls. What kind of person you become is, in the end, up to you. I wish you the very best.
Thanks for replying! Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that a job is not the end-all be-all and that we are ultimately responsible for who we become. I wanted to give a student-centered perspective and was more critiquing how the cultural attitudes of our society push students to perceive it this way, especially now, with a hostile job market and political attacks on higher education. There is especially this pressure to be "successful" by these financial metrics for students who are from less privileged backgrounds. I appreciate the important reminder that we do have control over our lives and minds and that we can thrive in the ways that really matter despite it all. :)
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.
"The act of writing is the act of thinking", well, writing is a tool to stimulate thinking, but it is not thinking itself. And don't get me wrong, writing is an excellent stimulation tool, maybe even one of the best we have, but still it is not thinking. A person who, for example, has a lot of manual skill, may find what stimulates his thinking is trying to assemble a new machine and mess around with it. And probably AI, well used, can be another tool to stimulate thinking.
"Nozick is wrong", well, what Nozick didn't estimate correctly is the extreme addictive power of the experience machine. On the other hand, it is true that a human addicted to the experience machine is less than a person each time he uses it, and that for that reason, it is very likely, that once addicted, he will not be able to escape from it. The gravitational pull of that black hole, is for most of humanity, infinitely stronger than their craving to accomplish things and become a real person. We don't even need AI to know that, it's enough to see the huge number of addicts to the mix of pop, the armchair and the fluorescent screen, combination that for all intents and purposes is another experience machine.
I think a 6th reason for cheating must be now added: It simply accomplishes things BETTER than the student, and thus can lead to a higher grade. This is not yet true in all fields, but it is certainly true in many (as of 2025 March) and I think it will soon be true in all undergrad classes.
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.
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.
I agree, but I would add that students did not invent this transactional view of college on their own. For decades, universities, employers, lenders, and policymakers have framed higher education as an investment whose value is measured mainly by future earnings. Once college is sold as a market transaction, students understandably begin to judge it like one. The tragedy is that the real value of higher education — intellectual formation, critical judgment, exposure to difficulty, learning how to think with and against others — is precisely what becomes hardest to defend in market terms. AI may intensify this problem by making the credential seem even more detached from actual competence. The question, then, is not simply whether college “pays off,” but whether we can still describe education as something more than employability.
Perhaps colleges need to become a little more like monasteries again: not in the religious sense, but as places set apart from the immediate logic of the market. A university should not merely certify employability; it should protect time, attention, and difficult thought from the demand to become instantly useful.
“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.
Agreed, it’s really not that complicated, most don’t value learning - at least not for the vast majority of their coursework - and don’t have a moral objection to using AI even if it’s considered cheating. (I just realized this was a post from a few months ago)
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.
I think Ghatanathoah is right in this case. Students didn't want a fake experience. If I could skip college and get the same job (and save tens of thousands of dollars), I absolutely would have. I learned 90% of what I needed to do my job in high school. I took 3 classes that made me a better programmer. Just three! If I could take those classes and and get the same degree, I would. (Although filling my entire 4 years with useful classes would have been better.) The rest were classes repeating things I already knew and "making me a more well rounded student" aka, the university wanted more money out of me.
If you knew all my classmates were getting better grades on classes you didn't care about by cheating... And by cheating you could pull fewer all nighters on classes you actually cared about... Wouldn't you be tempted to cheat?
No, sorry, you’re wrong: as a past student, I didn’t want a fake (or genuine) experience of becoming educated per se; I just wanted the degree so that I could start my career sooner!
It was merely a means to that end, without any cheating. Just be done with it ASAP and move on
The example really reminds me of Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt". That story is good to revisit once in a while but it rings so true
I think that we can safely assume that different students want different things out of college. Many probably - as you say - simply want the degree, as a merit useful to get a job. Others want to learn things, or even have the experience of learning. Some want the experience of hanging out in student bars. Etc.
I also suspect that there is a difference between what students want when they sit down and think about it and plan their future, and what they want when they choose if they are going to study, or spend this particular evening with their friends. Traditional moral philosophers call this 'temptation'. Short term choices often conflict with long term wishes, even when a person can make the choice entirely freely.
Personally, I enjoyed studying most of the time - but certainly not all the time - and then I ended up teaching in a university. I am aware that not all students think like I did.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that the potential benefits of AI outweigh the crushing damage it will do to human cognitive abilities by obviating the need for humans to develop and maintain skills. I talk to highly sophisticated investors in this space, and even they have moments of concern along these lines. The worst case scenarios along these lines could not be more dire. Hope I’m wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
;)
Overall Impression
A brutal, clever, and provocative essay that blends academic philosophy, psychology, and cultural critique into a bleak but compelling theory: students cheat with AI not just because they’re lazy or stressed—but because they’ve subconsciously chosen illusion over effort, simulation over substance. It’s saying: Nozick was wrong. We want the lie.
That’s chilling. And brilliant. But it’s not without its flaws.
🧠 Intellectual Strengths
1. The Philosophical Framing is Strong
The Nozick “Experience Machine” metaphor is a perfect backbone for this argument. It gives the piece conceptual depth beyond the usual “kids these days” narrative. It’s not just about cheating—it's about identity, integrity, authenticity. And the idea that AI is now a mass-produced, plug-and-play Experience Machine? Genuinely haunting.
2. Multi-layered Explanation of Cheating
Instead of relying solely on the tired "students are lazy" trope, it gives:
Psychological (akrasia, hyperbolic discounting)
Structural (ease of AI)
Philosophical (desire for illusion over reality) This builds toward a conclusion that cheating isn’t just expedient—it’s existential.
3. Sarcastic Tone Works Better Here
The piece leans into a dark humor that’s more pointed than in the “Average Student” piece. The dioxygen difluoride metaphor? Over-the-top but memorable. The dig at Claude’s AI safety reply? Funny and insightful—it shows the disconnect between AI ethics and lived human behavior.
⚠️ Weaknesses / Problem Areas
1. Hedonism = Truth? Nah.
The final leap—"hedonism is true, Nozick was wrong, students prefer illusion"—is bold, but reductive. It’s not that students consciously choose illusion; it's more that they are incentivized, trained, and nudged into it by decades of institutional and cultural conditioning.
Most students don’t want to cheat. They don’t wake up thinking “I’d rather be a fake person.” They do it because:
They’re overwhelmed
They lack the confidence or scaffolding
The system doesn’t reward authenticity, only credentials
They don’t even realize what’s being lost
So the framing risks being too cynical, even if it’s rhetorically potent.
✅ Better conclusion: students are being gradually trained to prefer the Experience Machine because it mimics reward without effort—rather than them explicitly preferring it.
2. It skirts institutional and economic realities
Again, like the first essay, this one focuses almost entirely on the moral/philosophical failing of students, with little examination of:
Why students don’t value learning (e.g., cost of living, debt, job market anxiety)
How universities have become commodified, outcome-driven businesses
How adjunctification and bureaucratization have gutted mentorship
The Experience Machine might be part of the answer, but it’s not the only machine at work.
3. It leaves no exit strategy
This essay, like the first, offers no solutions or even hope. It’s compelling as a diagnosis, but if you’re a teacher, student, or administrator, what now? The answer can’t just be: “give up, it’s all fake.”
🎯 Notable Quotes & Commentary
"Writing is not a tool to express our thoughts—the act of writing is the act of thinking."
Yes. This is one of the truest and most important lines in the essay. If writing is offloaded, thinking is offloaded—and that does erode the soul. But this insight could have been its own essay—philosophically expanded, pedagogically engaged.
"Pretending to have earned a degree. They are hedonists abjuring the development of the self."
Strong, but dangerously totalizing. Some students still care. Many are caught between forces.
“We have to give grades, and grades are a kind of testimony.”
Great epistemological moment. Worth expanding. Grades as testimony introduces a moral obligation often ignored in grading discourse.
📚 Literary + Stylistic Notes
Voice: Witty, confident, jaded but still intellectually engaged.
Structure: Clear progression—starts with the scale of cheating, explores coping strategies, diagnoses deeper roots, lands with the Experience Machine as synthesis.
Style: Punchy, metaphor-rich, quotable. Could be trimmed by 15% for conciseness.
Conclusion
This essay is stronger than the “Average Student” piece. It frames the cheating crisis not as a moral failing or laziness epidemic, but as a philosophical symptom of a society that increasingly prefers appearance over reality. That’s profound.
But it overstates its case. Students aren’t purely hedonists. They’re people trapped in a gamified credential economy. The Experience Machine metaphor is powerful—but incomplete without a systems critique.
Still, this piece deserves to be widely read in academia. It's a fire alarm that actually tries to explain why the fire started—not just complain about the smoke.
Thanks, Claude. Or Gemini?
That's just good old GPT. They are surprisingly good at textual analysis. To be completely honest, I am both terrified and inspired by what GPT produce after certain types of training.. The AI detection tools are very easy to circumvent. I mean, you can simply ask the AI to rewrite in a way that would not be detected by them. Human tendencies will lead to doing everything by AI right up until it causes everything to collapse. Humans are special creatures.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. I certainly believe that "writing is the act of thinking." But the game of school (I’m a high school educator) has caused teachers to expect student essays that look a certain way (e.g., traditional 5-paragraph structure; claim-evidence-reasoning), rather than rewarding an exploration of thought.
I think young people want authentic experiences in life. But they might not see my classroom, or the writing assignments I give, as worthy of their full presence. After all, they might find that, if they commit to it in a genuine way, they might spend a lot of effort and fail in the end. Because the diploma is what matters, not the knowledge, it’s better to make sure they succeed.
This is sobering and sad and I see it in my high school classroom daily. We are in trouble not because AI exists, but because these younger humans don’t care to learn, grow, wrestle, and labor with thoughts and ideas. They want the easiest path to the pretend accomplishment. Watching students graduate when you know they can’t write a coherent paragraph about any topic is heartbreaking. And the fact that my hands are tied and I am forced to allow that to happen makes it even worse. All these alarms and yet no one is listening….
I work with writers who teach create writing. I believe that making more room for creative/imaginative writing is the antidote to AI academic writing. Sure, a student can get AI to write them a poem or story, but when students are taught to value writing as a process of discovery, deemphasizing the final product, I think the incentive to use AI will be less, and the inspiration to tell their own truth in their own voices will be greater. Instead of an analytic essay, assignments could be creative, project-based, and personal. When students feel their personal voices are valued, they will write.
Another motivation - concern that if they don’t use AI they’ll get worse grades than the ones who do. So there’s a race to the bottom.
I read this a while back, and I am deciding to come back to it and share my thoughts. The reality from what I have seen as an undergrad student is that most students simply do not value education at all -- not even as a concept. Students who offload high level analysis to AI whenever possible without a hint of remorse do so because they view a degree and an education as two distinctly separate entities, and they only desire the former. Because they understand how easy it is to acquire the degree using AI while avoiding meaningful punishment, they bypass the actual education to obtain that certification. It is false, but they don't care because they are so anxious about their future financial stability -- and can you really blame them? "Don't hate the player", they'll tell you, “Hate the game!" The system (late-stage capitalism) is cold to them, so when they find a loophole, they will use it shamelessly. So many of my fellow students (especially at the school I go to since it is very pre-professional) see a degree as a monetary investment: give some money now to acquire a more lucrative career and earn it back later. A lot of them are deeply insecure about their abilities and worry that they will not be able to get as high of an ROI without using AI to fraudulently achieve higher grades. I don't even think they care about what the degree represents or the perception of being an educated scholar. It's all just about money, which is why they don't even try to hide their cheating from one another, sometimes even being proud of it. If college made one appear educated but didn't improve financial outcomes and hold cultural capital (to be converted back to economic capital), we wouldn't see cheating; we'd just see universities' enrollment plummet.
I agree with your assertion that students' indifference toward becoming self-actualized, educated individuals is the root of the AI problem, and I think it needs to be addressed at every step of a child's development in the classroom. However, placing this responsibility on teachers to cultivate critical thinking would be futile because there is only so much they can do, as anti-intellectualism is systematically perpetuated by the economic structure we are subject to. In a late-stage capitalist society, every aspect of your livelihood is saying that you need to WORK to earn MONEY to be HAPPY and thinking is wasting time because you aren't producing anything. ChatGPT can produce words 1000x faster than you, and in a society that lauds productivity and places efficiency on a pedestal, the purity of the obtainment process is irrelevant. Only the end product matters, so it's okay for intellectual labor to be outsourced to AI! This societal mindset is conditioning students to use AI to cheat. I don't necessarily think they are pleasure-seeking hedonists; they are just a product of their environment and the values it instills in them. I resonate with the experience machine metaphor, but it places a bit too much blame on the students for my liking. Their indifference toward education -- both as an actual experience and even as a concept -- is more of a reflection of a faulty economic system than an indication of individual moral failings.
Honestly, the pervasive anti-intellectualism among my demographic just makes me sad and dejected. I love being a student, and I hate the way college is marketed to teens now, and I hate that sometimes I find myself falling for it because it's impossible not to feel anxious about the future when the job market gets worse every year. I don't want to end up in poverty because I was too self-righteous to use AI in college! I know that jumping to this dichotomy is catastrophizing and a reflection of my anxieties, which I am not alone in feeling, but all students are placed in the age-old ethical dilemma that forces us to (at least to some degree) choose between money and morals. Everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum, and I am not going to sit on a high horse and judge those who waver toward the other side because it's not our fault that we were forced to make this choice in the first place. It does become difficult to maintain this self-control when the benefits are so intangible, and I am being pushed to give in constantly by every facet of my life. When I am writing an essay, and my friend who used AI gets a better grade then me, I am going to be upset. Despite my frustration, I still won't abuse AI because I value the truthful process of education too much, and I know I would only be doing myself a disservice in the long run. However, I will not judge those who do too harshly because I understand how they feel, and I slip up sometimes too (but from panic cheating). I hate that society makes students feel like they need to forgo intellectual fulfillment to evade poverty, even if this belief is overstated. I hate that society makes them feel like there is nothing more to life than the mindless 9-5, crunching numbers for businesses instead of chasing passion. I know there is hope for the youth because I am full of it, but still, it makes me sad. Thanks for writing this! It definitely made me think.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. While it's true that everyone has to get a job eventually and become self-supporting, getting a job is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. I think "chase your passion or starve to death" is a false dichotomy. Life doesn't have to be a mindless death march of chasing a dollar; people confuse working for a living with living to work. As far as who is to blame, something I'm not terribly interested in, I'll say this: people are responsible for forging their own souls. What kind of person you become is, in the end, up to you. I wish you the very best.
Thanks for replying! Yes, I agree wholeheartedly that a job is not the end-all be-all and that we are ultimately responsible for who we become. I wanted to give a student-centered perspective and was more critiquing how the cultural attitudes of our society push students to perceive it this way, especially now, with a hostile job market and political attacks on higher education. There is especially this pressure to be "successful" by these financial metrics for students who are from less privileged backgrounds. I appreciate the important reminder that we do have control over our lives and minds and that we can thrive in the ways that really matter despite it all. :)
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.
"The act of writing is the act of thinking", well, writing is a tool to stimulate thinking, but it is not thinking itself. And don't get me wrong, writing is an excellent stimulation tool, maybe even one of the best we have, but still it is not thinking. A person who, for example, has a lot of manual skill, may find what stimulates his thinking is trying to assemble a new machine and mess around with it. And probably AI, well used, can be another tool to stimulate thinking.
"Nozick is wrong", well, what Nozick didn't estimate correctly is the extreme addictive power of the experience machine. On the other hand, it is true that a human addicted to the experience machine is less than a person each time he uses it, and that for that reason, it is very likely, that once addicted, he will not be able to escape from it. The gravitational pull of that black hole, is for most of humanity, infinitely stronger than their craving to accomplish things and become a real person. We don't even need AI to know that, it's enough to see the huge number of addicts to the mix of pop, the armchair and the fluorescent screen, combination that for all intents and purposes is another experience machine.
I see what you are saying, but an idea eventually does need to be written. Small essay are similar to repetition in the gym.
I think a 6th reason for cheating must be now added: It simply accomplishes things BETTER than the student, and thus can lead to a higher grade. This is not yet true in all fields, but it is certainly true in many (as of 2025 March) and I think it will soon be true in all undergrad classes.
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.