Cheating with Artificial Intelligence Won't Work

The promise of the AI revolution that was beginning to glow on the horizon five years ago is beginning to peek over the edge and the beams have blindsided too many in society.

New tools for the masses. Exciting, fun, and (for traditional educators) somewhat terrifying. AI is here and is going to get brighter and brighter as the tools become better, more sophisticated, and more targeted.

The future of work/learning has begun to arrive. Oh, I know - it has been here for ages. But it has really begun to arrive for a lot of people with the recent slew of announcements. There is a lot of room for optimism, but not if we just bungle our way into this brave new world. For those who refuse to embrace a whole new mindset, there will be hundreds of millions of tears. It doesn’t have to be that way.

We’re already hearing about barriers that will need to be erected around cheating in education. Get the program to write your essay. Easy and straightforward and it’s already being done.

What amazes me is that this was foreseen by anyone who opened their eyes. Even those with their eyes closed were hearing about it. And now it is here there is panic in the voices of most educators. The system is broken.

What I find unbelievable is the responses. We have to get AI to determine whether the work being submitted under a student’s name has been produced by AI or not.

This demonstrates nothing more than a reinforcement of the idea that grades and qualifications are all that matter. If qualifications are all there is, then getting a qualification as easily as possible using any tool available is the answer. Using AI to accomplish this is just a new way to play the same old game. What educators and students don’t realize is that this is different, this is a game changer.

Using AI to cheat a degree out of the system will only cheat the cheater.

This new, widely available AI can write reports, memos, literature reviews, and any other written communication for work as easily as it can write essays for school. Searching the literature for research findings, law precedents, and story backgrounds will be quicker, easier, and more thorough with AI than with a person. Crunching numbers with AI will become the same - quicker, easier, and more accurate. Whatever you can use AI for in school, it can do at work as well.

So, what is it that you are trying to get when you work toward a qualification? And what are colleges and universities trying to train their students to do? Without a revolutionary change in our collective mindsets, organizations will find the millions of workers who carry out cognitive tasks, unless they are very complex, redundant. AI is here and it’s just going to get better.

What can’t AI do well? It can’t think. It can mimic thinking and do the kind of thinking that we have used in our world of education and work for 60 or 70 years now, but it can’t do the kind of work that isn’t disposable.

What do I mean by disposable work? The quarterly reports. The training manuals. The orientation guides. The analytical summaries. The operations manuals. The memos. The meeting minutes. The discussion outcomes. The decision trees. The endless “communications” iterations. HR screening (already done). HR interviews. Even basic argument resolution (logic and rational thinking). All of these things can be easily handled by AI and these are the things that tens of millions of us do every day. This is what makes the wheels of bureaucracy turn.

Even evidence-based decision-making or common management concerns will be done by AI.

Never at my organization, you say! Goodbye Kodak. By employing AI to do all these things, your competitor will shed tens of thousands of jobs. How will you compete with having to pay so many people to do the work that a machine can do?

So, what do we need to teach our students for them to still have value in this world? We need to teach them to think. Think in ways that AI is not capable of.

What mindset is needed to accomplish this?

We will need to embrace learning rather than qualifications and grades. Learning rather than getting by. The attitude of “will this be on the exam” must go. The A+ attitude that demonstrates absolute conformity to expectations has to go. It isn't good enough to be able to regurgitate whatever students hear and read - AI can do it more accurately, faster, and present it more clearly. We need to look at real creativity as an asset rather than a threat. We need to encourage students to try something different rather than always strive for the right answer.

The right answer is AI’s specialty.

We need to train our students to attack the unanswerable and produce the unpredictable. AI can’t do that. Not with any kind of rational outcomes.

Keeping our focus on convergent learning and our students will (rightly) use AI to find convergent solutions.

If ever there was a time to think differently it is now.

But go ahead and play it safe. Keep doing what you have always done and prepare your students for the work that was valuable a decade ago. You will be part of the crowd. Just what we need for ourselves and our students. Competing with AI by learning to do exactly what AI excels at is going to be a winning strategy.

But if you ask open-ended exam questions you should be ok.