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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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 imagine these are the same idiots (in the old sense of the word as the experience machine would seem directly correlated to the degree of onanism present in that person) who are bitter about the poor ROI of their college degree and wonder why they can't find a job worthy of their perceived worth.
"...pretending to be an educated person with skills and knowledge that the machines actually have".
With respect, the machines don't. The machines are able, given access to the entire unbelievably vast contents of the Web, to manipulate them according to rules and produce written materials that meet quite demanding criteria. There is no knowledge, no skill, and certainly no intelligence, let alone consciousness.
I think the main key to the illusion is the immense amount of written material the software can draw on, and the unbelievable speed with which data is transferred and processed.
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.
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.
It was merely a means to that end, without any cheating. Just be done with it ASAP and move on
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 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I imagine these are the same idiots (in the old sense of the word as the experience machine would seem directly correlated to the degree of onanism present in that person) who are bitter about the poor ROI of their college degree and wonder why they can't find a job worthy of their perceived worth.
"...pretending to be an educated person with skills and knowledge that the machines actually have".
With respect, the machines don't. The machines are able, given access to the entire unbelievably vast contents of the Web, to manipulate them according to rules and produce written materials that meet quite demanding criteria. There is no knowledge, no skill, and certainly no intelligence, let alone consciousness.
I think the main key to the illusion is the immense amount of written material the software can draw on, and the unbelievable speed with which data is transferred and processed.