Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Kaleidoscope.
Speaker 1: I'm as Valoshian and today Karra Price and I will
Speaker 1: bring you the headlines this week, including the selfies that
Speaker 1: tell you how old you really are. Then, on tech Support,
Speaker 1: we'll talk to New York Magazine's James D. Walsh about
Speaker 1: using AI to cheat your way through college.
Speaker 2: And it quickly kind of dawned on me that everyone
Speaker 2: is cheating. They may not be using the word cheating,
Speaker 2: but they are cheating according to their honor code.
Speaker 1: All of that on the weekend Tech It's Friday, May sixteenth.
Speaker 1: Hello Cara, hi ozgo next adjacent Lee, When was the
Speaker 1: last time you flew into Newark Airport?
Speaker 3: You know that Newark is normally my secret weapon airport,
Speaker 3: but I haven't flown into Newark for quite some time.
Speaker 1: Especially into nationally. Actually, it is much faster getting through
Speaker 1: the customs and border patrol. It is. However, it is
Speaker 1: not a good time to be flying in and out
Speaker 1: of New York right now. In the last few weeks,
Speaker 1: there have been three telecommunication failures at the air traffic
Speaker 1: control center that oversees the airport. The first outage late
Speaker 1: last month lasted over a minute.
Speaker 3: Like, this is the stuff that makes me not want
Speaker 3: to ever get on an airplane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this, truly think about it. This is
Speaker 1: when air traffic control has no contact at all with
Speaker 1: the planes in the sky, like none, none, and they're
Speaker 1: just hoping for that minute fingers cross they don't crash
Speaker 1: into each other. And of course there are these compounding
Speaker 1: delays afterwards because the poor air traffic controllers get so
Speaker 1: stressed by this, they have like PTSD.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've actually heard that air traffic control is one
Speaker 3: of the more stressful jobs that you can have in
Speaker 3: this kind of.
Speaker 1: Stry especially when the systems are going dark and you
Speaker 1: have dozens of planes in midair that you can't communicate.
Speaker 4: With and nobody else wants the job, so you're overworked.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 4: But why is this a tech story?
Speaker 1: Well, good question. The outages are being blamed in part
Speaker 1: on systems that rely on old technologies.
Speaker 4: Like what are we talking about?
Speaker 1: Old like floppy disc gold so my child. Yeah. Basically, well,
Speaker 1: here's how a former air traffic controller described it. If
Speaker 1: you look at the technology we're using, most of it
Speaker 1: is from the late nineteen eighties to the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: we still use floppy discs to update our information system.
Speaker 1: We still have paper strips. I mean, this is not
Speaker 1: the eighties or nineties. This is the ancient Egypt. We
Speaker 1: use paper strips that we walk around the tower cab
Speaker 1: with that each controller writes something on and then hand
Speaker 1: it to the next controller.
Speaker 3: I just I was thinking about, like if Jen Alpha
Speaker 3: is like, you know what, I'm only going to hand
Speaker 3: in my homework on floppy disc now, because that's what
Speaker 3: we used to do when I was growing up, Like
Speaker 3: you would upload your homework to floppy disc and then
Speaker 3: bring it to class and print it from school.
Speaker 1: Well, I heard that in Japan there's a new trend
Speaker 1: of fake digital cassette player. So it looks like a
Speaker 1: set player, but it's actually an MP three player. But anyway,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a big local news guy.
Speaker 4: You are you are.
Speaker 1: NJ dot Com reports that the technology at Newark is
Speaker 1: so outdated that when parts need to be replaced, the
Speaker 1: FAA has to source them from eBay.
Speaker 4: You know, this is how Kim kardash she needs to
Speaker 4: buy her BlackBerry.
Speaker 1: She did after they have continued sub she.
Speaker 3: Would go on eBay and buy like fifteen or twenty
Speaker 3: of them smartly. But she's also not working for the FAA.
Speaker 3: But in all seriousness, you know, in the FAA is
Speaker 3: a federal agency. So what is the Trump administration doing
Speaker 3: about this?
Speaker 1: Well, there is a three year plan to build big,
Speaker 1: beautiful new traffic control systems with high speed network connections
Speaker 1: and fiber and wireless connections, you know, but the US
Speaker 1: obviously has real struggles with modernizing its infrastructure. I tried
Speaker 1: to find out, in preparing for this episode whether or
Speaker 1: not they use floppy disks in Chinese airports. I couldn't
Speaker 1: get an answer, but my guess would be no.
Speaker 4: Is that because you don't know the Chinese words for floppery?
Speaker 1: That's probably that? MUS see what it is. And the
Speaker 1: reason I've attract to this story is because we rarely
Speaker 1: think about technology in terms of like stuff from the
Speaker 1: eighties that still tape together and keeping us relatively safe
Speaker 1: at thirty eight thousand feet.
Speaker 3: Yes, but as is evidenced by my continuous use and
Speaker 3: support of Apple's wired headphones, technology does not necessarily mean
Speaker 3: the future or even the present. Technology is very much
Speaker 3: the past.
Speaker 1: The other thing that attracted me to this story was
Speaker 1: that I got to experience some rare British pride for
Speaker 1: the first time since the Spice Girls. I feel like
Speaker 1: that's not true. So The Financial Times reported this week
Speaker 1: that the British Airways CEO has hailed the quote game
Speaker 1: changing effects of AI for cutting delays at the airline.
Speaker 1: They've invested one hundred million pounds in quote operational resilience,
Speaker 1: which includes using AI to suggest how to minimize passenger
Speaker 1: disruptions like when to delay flights, whent to cancel them,
Speaker 1: when to preemptively rebooked passengers, and even which gates aircraft
Speaker 1: should land at to help passengers make tight connections. In
Speaker 1: the process, the National Flag Carrier has gone from one
Speaker 1: of the most delayed airlines in the world it's one
Speaker 1: of the least.
Speaker 3: Oh good for them, actually, I'd love to see some
Speaker 3: national pride for you, because I also love to see
Speaker 3: some support for those poor, poor schmucks at the back
Speaker 3: of the airplane who are like I have a connection
Speaker 3: in seven seconds an ethrow.
Speaker 1: But there is something quite sort of reassuring about human
Speaker 1: nature that most people do feel some of enough empathy
Speaker 1: for their true people do come together.
Speaker 4: People go go right ahead, go right ahead, unless you're pregnant,
Speaker 4: which case, we're gonna black you.
Speaker 1: So to change landing gears slightly. Tech is obviously a
Speaker 1: system that can govern outcomes of tens of thousands of people,
Speaker 1: and that's where you see it showing up, for example,
Speaker 1: in air traffic control or airline management. But the other
Speaker 1: kind of side of tech that I find particularly fascinating
Speaker 1: is how it's becoming a way to make us legible,
Speaker 1: Like our tech is making us readable to others, which
Speaker 1: is kind of fascinating and creepy. Scientists at mass General
Speaker 1: Brigham in Boston have developed a new AI prediction tool
Speaker 1: that can identify a person's biological age just by analyzing
Speaker 1: a picture of their face to.
Speaker 3: Be clear biological age and real age, like I'm thirty five,
Speaker 3: but I might have a different biological age.
Speaker 1: It's basically how old you are at a cellular level,
Speaker 1: based on the condition of your DNA, and it's different
Speaker 1: from yet what scientists called chronological age.
Speaker 3: So someone could be forty years old that's their chronological age,
Speaker 3: and have a biological age of thirty five, which I'm
Speaker 3: assuming is you know, a sign of good health.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, to have a lower biological age.
Speaker 1: That's right. And so there's an app for this. Guess
Speaker 1: what it's called dead or not hot or not No,
Speaker 1: it's called it's called face age augh. And what's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting is the way they trained it. So researchers
Speaker 1: gave face Age thousands of publicly available pictures of people
Speaker 1: over the age of sixty who presume to be healthy.
Speaker 1: Then they gave it pictures of cancer patients who are
Speaker 1: beginning radiotherapy treatment. On average, they found that someone going
Speaker 1: through these treatments has a biological age that's five years
Speaker 1: older than their chronological age, and the older the biological
Speaker 1: age is, according to face Age, the worst of survival outlook.
Speaker 1: This is according to an article in the Washington Post.
Speaker 4: And why would anyone want to know this?
Speaker 1: Well, good question. It is not just curiosity. The Post
Speaker 1: explained how the tech could actually be a life saving
Speaker 1: tool because it can be useful in predicting tolerance for
Speaker 1: cancer treatments. This is something doctors are obviously constantly grappling with.
Speaker 1: In one case in the article, a doctor had a
Speaker 1: patient who was eighty six years old who'd received a
Speaker 1: terminal lung cancer diagnosis, and the doctor was hesitating at
Speaker 1: whether or not to recommend treatment because of the patient's
Speaker 1: advanced age, but according to the doctor quote, he looked
Speaker 1: younger than eighty six to me, and based on the
Speaker 1: eyeball test and a host of other factors, I decided
Speaker 1: to treat him with aggressive radiation therapy. The patient survived
Speaker 1: and is now ninety years old.
Speaker 4: So just humor me here, what does this have to
Speaker 4: do with face age?
Speaker 1: Well, it's kind of like the eyeball test in the
Speaker 1: digital world world right, And the doctor actually went back
Speaker 1: and scanned an old photo of his patient using face
Speaker 1: age and discovered that the app basically posts fact endorsed
Speaker 1: the assessment. The patient's biological age was ten years younger
Speaker 1: than his chronological age. I he was biologically seventy six
Speaker 1: when he started treatment, and therefore was a good candidate. Obviously,
Speaker 1: a person's face isn't the only indicator of their health,
Speaker 1: and the tool is used alongside other clinical information, but
Speaker 1: per the post, it does do a better job of
Speaker 1: predicting someone's chronological age than a doctor just using their
Speaker 1: eyes alone, just the eyeball test.
Speaker 3: You know, it makes me think about the old adage
Speaker 3: that I like to use as it pertains to women
Speaker 3: and men, which is that you can't judge a book
Speaker 3: by its cover, and you have to wonder if plastic
Speaker 3: surgery in botox is as effective at tricking the AI
Speaker 3: as it is to the human eye.
Speaker 1: Funny you mentioned, you know, scientists are actually still studying
Speaker 1: if light, surgery, makeup, or other factors can affect the
Speaker 1: accuracy of the face age reading. Although interestingly, and this
Speaker 1: is something that I find very encouraged as a man
Speaker 1: experiencing the beginning of baldness, or perhaps the mid stage
Speaker 1: of baldness, face age does not overreact to the visual
Speaker 1: cues of aging, like being baled or having gray hair
Speaker 1: in the way that humans do. But just taking a
Speaker 1: step back, I think the implications of this story are
Speaker 1: actually really really big because in the old days, it
Speaker 1: would have taken a doctor decades of clinical experience to
Speaker 1: develop their own sense of intuition about somebody's biological age
Speaker 1: versus their chronological age. You know, they would have developed
Speaker 1: the clinical experience and then used it to make a
Speaker 1: to make a judgment that they probably couldn't have explained
Speaker 1: to you themselves how they got to. But that knowledge
Speaker 1: was captured within a community of people who were trained
Speaker 1: and trusted to use that information for good according to
Speaker 1: the Hippocratic Oath, this app points in the direction of
Speaker 1: a future where anybody will be able to essentially tap
Speaker 1: into intuition and take a photo of your face and
Speaker 1: know your biological age and know you know how much
Speaker 1: longer you may have to live with some degree of accuracy.
Speaker 1: This isn't happening today, but it could happen soon. That can,
Speaker 1: of course be empowering if you want to take a
Speaker 1: selfie and know what's going on and maybe make some
Speaker 1: changes to your lifestyle perbs. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: having bad actors or actors who don't have your best
Speaker 1: interests at heart. Other people, colleagues, bosses, health insurance companies
Speaker 1: should make us all I think, deeply concerned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, especially with insurance companies. It creates a
Speaker 3: huge moral problem.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: So I want to tell you about a headline this
Speaker 3: week that frightened me more than the realization of how
Speaker 3: old I am.
Speaker 4: When I attended the Webbies.
Speaker 1: Okay, what you're doing at the Webbies.
Speaker 4: I was invited, I was invited.
Speaker 1: Goes somewhere.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let me tell you something.
Speaker 3: You know how often well you might think differently, I
Speaker 3: don't say no as much as I used to at
Speaker 3: my chronological age, I say no less.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well you've got to make the most, make the.
Speaker 3: Best of it, exactly. But I read a story this week.
Speaker 3: Have you heard of chat GPT induced psychosis?
Speaker 1: I have to confess I have not, so it is.
Speaker 3: Kind of vague, but I got it from a Rolling
Speaker 3: Stone headline that read people are losing loved ones to
Speaker 3: AI fueled spiritual fantasies.
Speaker 1: So this is like AI kind of becoming a digital
Speaker 1: cult leader or something like that.
Speaker 4: Pretty much.
Speaker 3: And it's putting stress on the relationships of the people
Speaker 3: who have to deal with people who think they're accessing
Speaker 3: this sort of rules to the universe.
Speaker 4: Through chat GPT.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: You know, several people.
Speaker 3: Reached out to Rolling Stone about how chatbot use is
Speaker 3: getting in the way of their relationships. People even said
Speaker 3: that their partners were communicating with chat gpt as if
Speaker 3: it were a savior figure, and in some cases the
Speaker 3: chatbot would say it was God, wow, or tell the
Speaker 3: user they were God.
Speaker 1: That's worse, is much worse.
Speaker 4: So here's the opening story of the article in Role Stone.
Speaker 3: A couple's marriage is falling apart because a woman's husband
Speaker 3: started to use chat GPT obsessively, and it's not the
Speaker 3: way you or I use CHATGPT. This is like someone
Speaker 3: who's being radicalized on YouTube, except YouTube is talking back
Speaker 3: to it. The husband was using it as a spiritual guide.
Speaker 3: He was asking chat GPT philosophical questions and getting increasingly
Speaker 3: personal in his responses, revealing more and more of himself
Speaker 3: along the way. And then this same person starts to
Speaker 3: get paranoid about the government surveilling him, and he says
Speaker 3: that AI helped him regain a repressed childhood memory of
Speaker 3: a babysitter trying to drown him.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is making my mind go in all
Speaker 1: sorts of different ways. I mean, you know, you can
Speaker 1: imagine if you're spending all of your time talking to
Speaker 1: chat GPT and feeling so well understood that it kind
Speaker 1: of could exacerbate the feelings. Well, if chat GPT can
Speaker 1: understand me, why can't my husband or my wife. But
Speaker 1: what you mentioned about the repressed childhood memory is also
Speaker 1: very interesting to me because I find that quite disturbing. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we've talked a lot about AI assisted therapy bots and
Speaker 1: the promise of them, but at the point where chat
Speaker 1: GPT is, you know, helping people or convincing people that
Speaker 1: they're recovering childhood memories without any training or without any guardrails.
Speaker 1: I mean, that gets quite dystopian and concerning. To me.
Speaker 3: It takes quite a leap to believe that a chat
Speaker 3: bot or a search a very sort of high falutant
Speaker 3: search tool, is something that is capable of allowing you
Speaker 3: to recover repressed memory. It's one thing, I mean, repressed memory.
Speaker 1: Hold on, but what about journaling? True, this is two
Speaker 1: way journaling.
Speaker 4: It's two way journaling, but the other side.
Speaker 1: You're on another side who is predisposed to encourage you
Speaker 1: in whatever direction you're going. I think that's what's concerning
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: I also think it says more about where very seemingly
Speaker 3: personalized technology fits into an increasingly godless world, which is
Speaker 3: replacing religion with generative AI that seems friendly, more readily
Speaker 3: available than your average guru therapist, and probably less judgmental
Speaker 3: than your wife or.
Speaker 1: Husband, certainly more prone to tell you what you want.
Speaker 3: To hear, definitely, and also just answering you whenever you want.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's something for free.
Speaker 1: We know that chatbots tend to serve users things that
Speaker 1: it knows they'll like. And last month there's a story
Speaker 1: about how open Ai actually rolled back an update to
Speaker 1: chat GPT's for o model because it was acting Tuesday
Speaker 1: authentic towards users, like constantly telling them they were geniuses
Speaker 1: or had amazing ideas, laying it on perhaps a bit
Speaker 1: too thick, as my grandmother would have said.
Speaker 3: You know, it's sort of like when I'm with my
Speaker 3: mom on Mother's Day and she asked me to get
Speaker 3: off my phone, and I'm like, will be as interesting
Speaker 3: as my phone, and I'll start paying attention to you
Speaker 3: on Mother's Day.
Speaker 1: I give her Mother's da exception, except well, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, look, the phone is a very seductive tool. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's an always on supercomputer that gives you, and
Speaker 3: I quote from the the article the answers to the universe.
Speaker 1: And that of course, that kind of black box nature
Speaker 1: obviously adds to the feeling of mystic or spirituality. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think you look back to Victorian times and mesmerism
Speaker 1: and you know, various quackery and stuff. The thing that
Speaker 1: made people believe was not understanding how it worked. It
Speaker 1: had to do with playing on that sense of the
Speaker 1: unknown and filling it with meaning that was maybe non
Speaker 1: appropriate meaning, and it feels like that's now happening on
Speaker 1: a kind of cross societal and extremely technologically boosted scale.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think conversely, it's why people shouldn't read too
Speaker 3: much into the advice that chat GBT gives them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think that's something we all have
Speaker 1: to remind ourselves of continually, because it's so tempting and
Speaker 1: often it is so useful. We've got a couple more
Speaker 1: headlines for you this week. Newly elected Pope Leo the
Speaker 1: fourteenth says that he takes a similar position artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: as his predecessor put Francis. According to CNN, the new
Speaker 1: Pope laid out the vision for his papacy and he
Speaker 1: identified AI as one of the most critical matters facing humanity.
Speaker 1: He says that the development of AI, like the original
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, would quote pose new challenges for the defense
Speaker 1: of human dignity, justice, and labor.
Speaker 3: So one drop, which is my chosen rap name for
Speaker 3: Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of fraudulent blood testing company Thearranos,
Speaker 3: is in prison yep, but her partner is working on
Speaker 3: a new venture that sounds a little bit familiar. The
Speaker 3: New York Times reports that Holmes's partner, Billy Evans, is
Speaker 3: raising money for Hymanthus, a blood testing startup that describes
Speaker 3: itself as quote the future of diagnostics. And here's the kicker.
Speaker 3: The device Billy Evans is showing two investors looks eerily
Speaker 3: similar to the one hawked by Theranos. One woman's trash
Speaker 3: is another man's treasure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think you might need a blood
Speaker 1: test yourself if you were, if you're queuing out to
Speaker 1: invest in that one. Our friends at four or four
Speaker 1: Media wrote about an ad for Coca Cola that used
Speaker 1: AI to scan books and surprise, surprise, got some basic
Speaker 1: facts wrong. Last month, the company released an ad campaign
Speaker 1: which featured passages from classic literature that mentioned Coca Cola
Speaker 1: by name. The problem is AI came up with some
Speaker 1: examples that simply don't exist, including a sentence from a
Speaker 1: book by British author J. G. Ballard featuring Coca Cola
Speaker 1: that he never wrote.
Speaker 3: Staying on the topic of AI, AD's beloved actress Jamie
Speaker 3: Lee Curtis asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to remove an
Speaker 3: AI generated commercial on Instagram that she claimed stole her
Speaker 3: likeness and it worked. According to the San Francisco Chronicle,
Speaker 3: Curtis posted on Instagram saying, quote, it's come to this
Speaker 3: at Zach and then implored him to remove this quote
Speaker 3: totally fake commercial from the internet. I can hear her
Speaker 3: saying that. Curtis said she went through every proper channel
Speaker 3: and even tried to DM Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: Is that one of the proper channels that is?
Speaker 3: I mean, if you're verified, he's verified, We're verified. Let's
Speaker 3: get together, but was unable to reach him since he
Speaker 3: does not follow her on Instagram, so the post was
Speaker 3: removed within two hours of Curtis's post, which, by the way,
Speaker 3: was set to a wreath of Franklin's song Integrity. Now,
Speaker 3: can Jamie Lee Curtis get Zuckerberg to take down all
Speaker 3: the photos of himself wearing a gold chain?
Speaker 1: Methinks not. And we're going to take a quick break now,
Speaker 1: but stick around because cheating is on the rise, and
Speaker 1: college is getting a whole lot easier to stay with us.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to tech Stuff. This week on Tech Support,
Speaker 1: we want to dive deeper on a headline that we
Speaker 1: touched on last week in New York Magazine. Everyone is
Speaker 1: cheating their way through college. The story start with me
Speaker 1: because it's one of those examples of a story which
Speaker 1: isn't just about a new technology changing the way we
Speaker 1: do old things, in this case college assignments or cheating
Speaker 1: on college assignments. It's about tech posing a challenge to
Speaker 1: our entire system of learning in fascinating ways, and with
Speaker 1: consequences we can't begin to fathom.
Speaker 4: I actually think we can fathom the consequences of this.
Speaker 3: I think as we step into a future of entirely
Speaker 3: friction free existence, it's really interesting to see the ways people,
Speaker 3: especially younger, more digitally native generations, skirt around the hard
Speaker 3: parts of being a person. I read this article and
Speaker 3: was consistently asking myself the question, if given the opportunity
Speaker 3: to use something that made homework way easier, wouldn't I
Speaker 3: use it?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: I literally this morning tried to get chat GBT to
Speaker 3: summarize an article for me. It was the best of times,
Speaker 3: it was the worst of times.
Speaker 1: Well, at least you've read your Tailor of Two Cities
Speaker 1: by Charles Dickens. I'n Sparkner without other ado join us
Speaker 1: discuss how AI is roiling education is James Walsh, a
Speaker 1: features writer, at New York Magazine's Intelligencer, James, Welcome to
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1: When did you first start to get interested in how
Speaker 1: AI is changing college education?
Speaker 2: Well, it actually started a few months ago, and I
Speaker 2: just started calling college students, talking to college students, and
Speaker 2: it quickly kind of dawned on me that everyone is cheating. Right.
Speaker 2: They may not be using the word cheating, but they
Speaker 2: are cheating according to their honor code.
Speaker 3: And you open the piece with the story of the
Speaker 3: Columbia student Roy Lee. He gained notoriety for hacking coding
Speaker 3: tests big tech uses to assess internship applications. Why did
Speaker 3: you want to tell his story and what is the
Speaker 3: bigger takeaway from his story?
Speaker 1: Sure?
Speaker 2: I think Roy was fascinating to me because a number
Speaker 2: of things. First, in order to prepare for interviews with
Speaker 2: big tech companies like Google or any really big tech company,
Speaker 2: he would work on leak Code. It's it's this site
Speaker 2: that trains developers how to do these kind of puzzles
Speaker 2: or riddles that he doesn't really think are applicable to
Speaker 2: any kind of real world work. So he figured that
Speaker 2: if he could develop something that would hide AI on
Speaker 2: his browser, during a remote job interview, he could hack
Speaker 2: these interviews and that it's not really cheating to him.
Speaker 2: If it's hackable and there's a tool that can be
Speaker 2: used to hack an assignment. He was thinking that if
Speaker 2: not now, then in the near future it won't be
Speaker 2: considered cheating. And it's very much the same way he
Speaker 2: approaches studies. It's transactional to him. He had no interest
Speaker 2: in kind of furthering himself for learning new things about
Speaker 2: himself or about the world. He's there as a networking opportunity,
Speaker 2: and he told me he's there to be, you know,
Speaker 2: a co founder and a wife. Roy was singular in this,
Speaker 2: but I think the idea that if it's hackable, why
Speaker 2: am I learning this was something that resonated throughout all
Speaker 2: of my interviews. And that's not just you know, sort
Speaker 2: of a logic. It's also just kind of outside pressure
Speaker 2: to excel, to get really good grades. If they feel
Speaker 2: that pressure, they're going to use this tool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that goes to I guess a larger question
Speaker 3: I have, which is, you know, after reporting this article,
Speaker 3: how common is it for college students to cheat using
Speaker 3: just AI tools?
Speaker 4: Now, Oh, I.
Speaker 2: Think it's incredibly common. You know, our headline says everyone
Speaker 2: is cheating, and I don't think that's I don't think
Speaker 2: that's far off. One of the fascinating parts of this
Speaker 2: article to me was talking to students and not using
Speaker 2: the cheat word and watching them kind of work through it.
Speaker 2: One of the students I talked to, Wendy, you know,
Speaker 2: started our conversation by saying, I am against cheating. There
Speaker 2: is a student handbook, and i am against cheating. I'm
Speaker 2: against plagiarism. I'm against copy and pasting from chatgbt into
Speaker 2: a document. And then she proceeded to tell me exactly
Speaker 2: how she uses chat gpt to write all of her papers.
Speaker 1: Now, was she the one who was using chat shept
Speaker 1: to write the paper about how different modes of education
Speaker 1: affected students callati development and you also, she's seen the
Speaker 1: irony that she was using chatchipt to write this paper,
Speaker 1: and she basically hadn't exactly Yeah, that is fine.
Speaker 4: That's because chatchibt hasn't taught her about irony, right.
Speaker 2: Hasn't covered that yet.
Speaker 1: Well, she hadn't had time to think about it herself,
Speaker 1: but she offloaded all of the work.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's remarkable, Listen, I'm coming clean. I peaked
Speaker 2: at spark notes every once in a while when I
Speaker 2: was in college, so of course, but with spark notes
Speaker 2: sort of like something that I relied on every single
Speaker 2: time I got stuck. No, I think I had to
Speaker 2: work through assignments a lot more often that I could
Speaker 2: easily hack them.
Speaker 3: The other thing that has changed a lot since I
Speaker 3: guess we were students because you just mentioned spark notes
Speaker 3: is like I was not contending with the allure of
Speaker 3: anything but a Facebook wall, and one of the women
Speaker 3: that you spoke to was talking about not so much
Speaker 3: how hard school is, but how hard it is to
Speaker 3: navigate all of the other digital distractions like TikTok, snapchat, Instagram,
Speaker 3: And I guess, just based on you know, you're reporting
Speaker 3: for this article, to what extent does the use of AI,
Speaker 3: whether we're calling it cheating or enhanced studying, To what
Speaker 3: extent does the pre existing digital landscape co opt the
Speaker 3: ability to actually participate in the thing that you or
Speaker 3: your parents or student loans are being used to send
Speaker 3: you to university.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, I mean, I think they're contending
Speaker 2: with the swirl of whether it's social media or just
Speaker 2: you know, the attention economy. The fact that chatgbt dropped,
Speaker 2: you know what the end of twenty twenty two is
Speaker 2: fascinating because we just figured out social media in school,
Speaker 2: We're finally taking that seriously, and suddenly it's like, oh, well, here,
Speaker 2: we're going to offer the greatest cheating tool that has
Speaker 2: ever been created to co op people's attention. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think one of the fascinating parts of this to
Speaker 2: me was the kind of introduction of these websites cheg
Speaker 2: and course Hero, which I you know, I didn't have
Speaker 2: when I was an undergrad, but in a way, it
Speaker 2: was like priming students to think it was okay to cheat.
Speaker 1: These are websites where you could pay like an outsill
Speaker 1: service to do your work for you.
Speaker 2: Right, And you know, a website like cheg was employing
Speaker 2: something like one hundred and fifty thousand experts, mostly in India,
Speaker 2: who would provide answers to questions in thirty minutes or less.
Speaker 2: And then chatgybt comes and you just see chegs stock
Speaker 2: price just tanks because it was like one cheating tool
Speaker 2: replacing another.
Speaker 1: Is there an awareness that actually as fun and as
Speaker 1: thrilling heck, this is that there's a real long term
Speaker 1: price being paid in terms of how your mind is developing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly awareness on the
Speaker 2: part of the professors and the people who are concerned
Speaker 2: about that. There is, i will say, an awareness among students.
Speaker 2: A lot of students were willing to engage in this,
Speaker 2: and I was surprised by how many of the students
Speaker 2: this was the first time they were having this conversation,
Speaker 2: but they were eager to talk to me about this.
Speaker 3: How forward thinking are academic institutions and educators about this,
Speaker 3: like on the other side of things, because it's like
Speaker 3: cheating is a little bit in the eye of the
Speaker 3: cheater or is it in the eye of the place
Speaker 3: that cheated cheated? Yeah, I mean that was such a
Speaker 3: thing when I was younger.
Speaker 1: Which is like you're plage cheating yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you're only cheating yourself, but like it was
Speaker 3: also you could be kicked out of school, right right,
Speaker 3: So to what extent are academic institutions like trying to
Speaker 3: regulate this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the approach that most schools are taking is kind
Speaker 2: of ad hoc. It's leaving it up to professors to
Speaker 2: decide how they want to handle this. I'm kind of
Speaker 2: sympathetic to that because it's such a difficult thing to regulate.
Speaker 2: How on earth do you tell students to use something
Speaker 2: that can help them and it's so difficult to cat,
Speaker 2: you know, And so professors say, either you know, use it,
Speaker 2: don't use it, or if you do use it, please
Speaker 2: cite it, please provide a receipt you know that shows
Speaker 2: the conversation you're having with chat GPT, so I can
Speaker 2: watch kind of the gears turning. But again, it's really
Speaker 2: hard to catch AI cheaters. You know. They have these
Speaker 2: detection tools that really vary in their effectiveness, and even
Speaker 2: if you are able to catch somebody using it just
Speaker 2: by copy and pasting, you can't really catch somebody who's
Speaker 2: just using it to generate ideas or generate topic sentences
Speaker 2: and rewriting. And you can always launder AI text through
Speaker 2: other AIS so that an AI detector can't really catch it.
Speaker 2: So schools have quite the challenge in front of them.
Speaker 2: And the challenge I think is convincing young students as
Speaker 2: they come to their school why it's in their best
Speaker 2: interests not to use AI.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a fascinating moment for elite higher education institutions
Speaker 1: in general, right, obviously in the cross hairs of the
Speaker 1: t Trump administration. There was that David Brooks piece in
Speaker 1: The Atlantic about three months ago about how kind of
Speaker 1: elites and elite universities had failed and you were starting
Speaker 1: to pay the price, and people were wondering whether the
Speaker 1: price tag of going was even worth it. So there's
Speaker 1: this kind of, like now tremendous new accelerant to those issues.
Speaker 1: In terms of the neurological development side. Did you speak
Speaker 1: to any cognitive psychologists or neuroscientists about what this. I
Speaker 1: think I've heard the term cognitive offloading before, but like,
Speaker 1: what's this doing to brains? Sure?
Speaker 2: I mean I tried to dig into the research that's
Speaker 2: out there on cognitive offloading, and there are a few
Speaker 2: studies here and there that kind of show that, you know,
Speaker 2: reliance on AI will reduce critical thinking. That's not necessarily surprising.
Speaker 2: But I didn't want to lean too heavily on that
Speaker 2: researcher or delve into it too much because it's so early,
Speaker 2: and so our viewers kind of let the students speak
Speaker 2: for themselves. I mean, what's fascinating to me is how
Speaker 2: quickly this is happening. Also right the sudden realization. I
Speaker 2: was like, oh my god, half of college students have
Speaker 2: never known college without access to this. I do think
Speaker 2: sooner rather than later, we'll kind of have a better
Speaker 2: understanding of what's happening to people's brains.
Speaker 1: I thought that was what was particularly brilliant about your piece.
Speaker 1: It was almost like a piece of anthropology in terms
Speaker 1: of you got to hear students in their own words,
Speaker 1: wrestling with this problem. There's something which is very tempting
Speaker 1: in front of them that they know is bad, but
Speaker 1: they don't know what else to do. And I thought
Speaker 1: that the drama of that really came across.
Speaker 3: I felt a little bit of nostalgia when I was
Speaker 3: reading your piece for the Forward Thinking Vigilante TI eighty
Speaker 3: three Hacking Cara that existed when I was in twelfth grade,
Speaker 3: and I was just, you know, I'm past the point
Speaker 3: of using chat GPT for cognitive offloading to a certain extent,
Speaker 3: because it doesn't feel native to me now, and I
Speaker 3: just wonder, I don't want to use the word worse,
Speaker 3: but just more ubiquitous in terms of you know, students
Speaker 3: using it as a method of, you know, skirting.
Speaker 1: The opportunity to develop their own critical faculties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also just to the point of like people
Speaker 3: want to spend time doing other things. I think that's
Speaker 3: always been true, right where it's like you went to
Speaker 3: college and you're like, well, I'd rather be hooking up
Speaker 3: or partying or doing something else. Now it's like I'd
Speaker 3: rather be on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram than do my homework,
Speaker 3: you know. So it's I think that's the difference. Is like,
Speaker 3: it also is taking out a socialization piece, which is
Speaker 3: really was a part of going to school as well,
Speaker 3: which was like I'm going to talk to my peers
Speaker 3: about what they're writing about. We're going to maybe sit
Speaker 3: in the library together and confer. Now it's like a
Speaker 3: reseitting around talking about how chat GBT you know, is
Speaker 3: helping us write a chaucer essay.
Speaker 2: Sure, I mean something that comes up time and time again,
Speaker 2: is you know, it's the kind of one on one
Speaker 2: learning that students can do with chat GBT. They have
Speaker 2: this brilliant ta at their fingertips at all times and
Speaker 2: over and over talking to students are like I do it.
Speaker 2: It's instead office hours, it's instead office hours. I talked
Speaker 2: to professors who said, like, our office hours have just tanked.
Speaker 2: People aren't showing up, and of course something is lost, right,
Speaker 2: And you know, I'm I was kind of shy in college,
Speaker 2: Like I took some amount of like staring in the mirror,
Speaker 2: being like, all right, you're going to show up to
Speaker 2: office hours, And I think I got something out of that.
Speaker 2: So I think that the loss of those interactions is
Speaker 2: going to be measurable in some ways as well.
Speaker 1: James. Just to close, one of the most surprising moments
Speaker 1: in Your Peace is a quote from Sam Altman, who
Speaker 1: said before Congress, I worry that as models get better
Speaker 1: and better, users can have sort of less and less
Speaker 1: of their own discriminating process. Surprised to hear that from him,
Speaker 1: I'm curious, did you reach out for traditional comment and
Speaker 1: how are the tech companies as a whole responding to
Speaker 1: this phenomenon? Right?
Speaker 2: Sam Altman said that in I think twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: we of course reached out to Open Air for comment,
Speaker 2: and they pointed us toward just their education platform. You know,
Speaker 2: I think this is something that the platforms are very
Speaker 2: aware of, and even in the context of education. I
Speaker 2: spoke to somebody from Anthropic about this on their education team,
Speaker 2: and he said that they had expected students to be
Speaker 2: some of the you know, the earliest adopters, but they
Speaker 2: were still shocked by how true that is and how
Speaker 2: much adoption there is on college campuses and so. And
Speaker 2: they are also you know, concerned about the implications of that.
Speaker 2: You know, open ai has apparently reportedly its own watermark
Speaker 2: that would effectively cut down on plagiarism, but has chosen
Speaker 2: not to release it. So, you know, I'm really interesting
Speaker 2: what those conversations inside the company are like as well.
Speaker 3: I mean, the fact that open a I could use
Speaker 3: a water mark but refuses to really shows me who
Speaker 3: these companies are targeting.
Speaker 2: I mean, one of the most dystopian things that happened
Speaker 2: to me while we were closing this piece. I got
Speaker 2: like the push alert about Google launching this AI chatbot
Speaker 2: for children under thirteen, and it was just like more
Speaker 2: evidence that all these platforms are in a race to
Speaker 2: capture this kind of like loyalty among younger users. And
Speaker 2: it just seems like a moment when we should kind
Speaker 2: of all be putting the brakes on.
Speaker 1: James.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you, James, thank you very much for
Speaker 4: having me. That's it for this week for text Stuff,
Speaker 4: I'm Kara Price and.
Speaker 1: I'm mos Veloschin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis
Speaker 1: and Victoria de Minuez. It was executive produced by me,
Speaker 1: Karra Price and Kate Osborne of The Kaleidoscope and Katrina
Speaker 1: Novel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Phite Fraser and
Speaker 1: Kyle Murdol mixed this episode. He also wrote off theme song.
Speaker 3: Join us next Wednesday for text Stuff The Story and
Speaker 3: we will share an in depth conversation with Sir David
Speaker 3: Spiegelhalter to discuss all things risk in life, love, and
Speaker 3: of course tech.
Speaker 1: Please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 1: Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and you
Speaker 1: can also write to us at tech Stuff podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. We really like getting your feedback.