We, educators, have brought the AI crisis on ourselves.
For decades, certainly throughout my entire childhood and well before it, we have created and honed a myth that getting good grades is the same as mastery, and that hence the purpose of education is to get high grades. Education, the learning of new things for the sake of knowledge, took a back seat to tests and essays and, ultimately, grades.
The grades were supposed to be a sign of understanding, but just as paper money stopped being a proxy for the underlying value and became a thing with its own intrinsic value, so too did grades become the final and sole goal of the cynical student’s pursuit.
Until the last decade, more or less, we could at least carry the pretense that cheating on certain tasks was difficult enough to not be worth it. This was a collusive pretense: Teachers agreed with students to believe that essays clearly written for pay or by older siblings were in fact original to the student. Teachers agreed with students to believe that identical work on mathematics assessments was because the students all studied together.
Cheating is not new. The technology of cheating is new.
In my teens, which occurred during the 1980s, home taping was rampant. Rampant enough that several of my albums from the era had some version of “Home taping is killing the music industry” stamped on them. (Spoiler: The music industry survived the 1980s.)
Then came the Internet. Home taping had been limited to friends of friends of friends, copies becoming increasingly degraded. I had cassette tracks that warbled from being fourth generation copies. (An example that stands out: “People Who Died” by The Jim Carroll Band.)
The internet allowed music to be shared in digital copies as freely as people cared to share, with no degradation of copies. Napster was the canary in the internet coalmine, and though it’s now a premium service, it has been replaced with myriad sites that allow free (generally illegal) downloading of whatever media you care to look for.
Theft is not new: The technology of theft is new.
“You wouldn’t steal a car.”
So, to return to the issue of cheating: The problem is not the students. The problem is the system. It’s not just that the system rewards cheating, which it does: The problem is that the system puts no real premium on actually learning anything.
When I was a teen, some of my peers would mock the math teachers who gave the “even numbered” questions. Didn’t they know the even numbered answers were in the back of the book?
The teachers who did this did so because they were trying to put a premium on the learning, the work, the pathway. Not on the end result.
If we want AI cheating to become irrelevant, the key is not to find new ways to determine if an essay has been written by AI. Each new generation of AI software uses each new generation of AI-detection tools as part of their algorithm.
The system will eat itself.
The system is eating itself.
It’s far beyond time for a cultural shift, away from a grades-based perspective towards a learning for the sake of learning perspective.
And that’s going to take a lot more re-alignment than downloading the next AI-detection tool.