Is ChatGPT killing higher education?

0:28Hello, this is Decoder Senior Producer Kate Cox. thank goodness, are back in school right around now. So we thought it would be a perfect time to revisit host Sean Illing talking with journalist James Walsh about how AI tools like ChatGPT have kicked off a new cheating arms race that's proving extremely disruptive to college education. There are a lot of big decoder ideas and problems wrapped up in all this. Okay, the gray area with Sean Illing. Enjoy. What's the point of college if no one's actually doing the work? It's not a rhetorical question. More and more students are not doing the work.

1:08They're offloading their essays, their homework, even their exams to AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, they're not just study aids anymore. They're doing everything. We are living in a cheating utopia. And professors know this. They see it. It's becoming more common. But they can't always prove it. And more often than not, they're too burned out or unsupported to do anything about it. So what are we doing here? What is higher education at this point? I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.

1:52My guest today is James Walsh. He's a features writer for New York Magazine's Intelligencer and the author of the most unsettling piece I've read about the impact of AI on higher education. Walsh spent months talking to students and professors who are living through this moment. And what he found isn't just a story about cheating. It's a story about ambivalence and disillusionment and despair. A story about what happens when technology moves much faster than our institutions can adapt. We cover a lot of ground here. We talk about the students who are cheating because they can, the ones who are cheating because they feel like they have to.

2:38We talk about the professors who are giving up. the administrators who don't want to confront the problem, and what all of this means not just for the future of college, but the future of writing and thinking.

2:55James Walsh, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm glad you're here. I love this piece, and I'm really excited to talk to you about it. It resonated with me on a few different levels, which I'm sure we will get to. I'll just start. I mean, it doesn't seem like AI is your beat, as it were. So how did you get drawn into the wonderful world of AI cheating? My editor and I were having just a conversation about cheating and not AI. So I started doing these interviews and kind of realized that there was no way to write a cheating story without it being about AI. And not only that, it was like, oh, everybody I'm talking to is in some way cheating, even if they don't think it's cheating.

3:50It's just everywhere. And it's like bending the very definition of cheating. I mean, is there any other way people are cheating these days? It's not like people are taking, are people taking Scantron still and like looking over shoulders and bubbling in? I did talk, yeah, I talked to students who were like, oh, the kind of old school cheating, you know, the tradecraft is still there. There's still, you know, whether it's people using Apple watches to pull up PDFs or, you know, scribbling something on the palm of their hands. As one student said to me, it's like, you know, the floor of cheating is still there.

4:24It's just that, like, the ceiling's been blown off. I'm both elated and bummed that I missed the golden age of cheating. I know. I would go back and forth like, yeah, I use Sparknotes, of course. I use, you know, every once in a while I peek at Sparknotes. I'm actually very glad that I didn't have this tool when I was in college. Yeah, I am too, ultimately. And we will also get to that, I'm sure. One thing that really made the piece work is how candid everyone you spoke to was, especially the students. And I know it's hard to get people to talk on the record about something they're not supposed to be doing.

5:05How did you go about finding these students and why do you think they were so open? The reporting process for finding these students was sort of like, you know, any kind of story. It's, I'll find, I'll talk to anybody.

5:22So, I would find them through student newspapers was a big one. Whether they were mentioned in a story or a few of them had written op-eds. So, those students were, of course, eager to talk about AI even on the record because they had written op-eds. In fact, one memorable interview was a student, as a freshman, she had written kind of an optimistic AI op-ed saying we need to incorporate AI more in the classroom to teach students how to use this for the rest of their lives. And then I talked to her, you know, as a sophomore sometime in the past few months. And the first thing she said, she's like, I have done a 180.

6:06We need to get AI out of the classroom. And that was just kind of indicative of like how many more students over just the past two semesters are using it. And then I, you know, another kind of notable one where I reached out to a lot of students who were having these conversations already on Reddit and Discord. And one student in Canada, she went on to her school's thread on Reddit and said, I have a problem. Do you guys have any advice for how to, like, kick a chat GPT addiction? because I am fully addicted. And it was a really earnest kind of request. And so I reached out to her and she was like, yeah, let's talk.

6:55And then, of course, just, you know, one student can lead to another student and just kind of trying to speak with every sort of student I could find. Well, let's walk through the tools that students are using, because I still think there are a lot of people who just aren't familiar with any of this have not yet dipped their toes into the wonderful world of LLMs and chatbots. What are the main platforms? Are we talking about, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and how are students using them to cheat? Sure. I mean, the The vast majority of students I talked to were using ChatGPT, OpenAI's platform chatbot.

7:42And so much so that sometimes they would even refer to ChatGPT and then I'd go back to them. And, you know, maybe they were using another platform, but ChatGPT was just kind of shorthand for a chatbot or AI. But, of course, students talked about using Anthropics, Claude and Gemini, Google and Copilot. And they were using it for kind of every facet of their education, really. You know, I think it's my bias as, you know, an English major and a writer where I was really interested in hearing how they were using it to write their essays or outline their essays or generate ideas for their essays. but students were also eager to talk about, you know, how they used it to take notes during class for them or summarize textbooks or create study guides and outlines.

8:43And then one of the biggest use cases is just computer science students who are using it to code. Some science students using it, you know, to analyze data. But the computer science students using it to code is just a huge use case. And I spoke with a computer science professor at Berkeley, one of the top computer science schools in the country, who said his students have a serious problem. Tons of his students are using it on their take-home assignments. And then when they're tested on the same sorts of problems in class, they're failing. Have they realized that if they're using the chatbots to code, that they actually won't be needed as coders?

9:30Exactly. That's exactly what this professor told them. You know, if you are depending on AI, now you are just training yourself to be an assistant. I think he put it, you know, the way he put it was an assistant to an AI platform. And you are going to be the most replaceable person in the workforce. And he said that, you know, he has had conversations with executives at these tech companies who ask him, why would I hire a coder now anyway? And we see that in the workforce, right? I think Microsoft just laid off a ton of coders. Do they feel that when they're told that, hey, look, you're making yourself that much more replaceable?

10:13Is that something they really feel in their bones or people are just kind of rolling with it? You know, that's a really good question. I will say, you know, certainly a good percentage of the students I spoke to have concerns and are aware to some extent of what they're doing as they rely more and more on AI. I think there's maybe kind of a whiplash going on here in a sense that, like, they're entering school at a time when, like, what can I study now that is going to get me a job later? What skills will be necessary in four years? This stuff is moving so quickly that I might as well offload this learning or I might as well not work hard at acquiring these skills because who knows if four years from now they're going to help me.

11:19And I understand that kind of fear. So what's the simplest example of the process here of how people are using it? I mean, is it as simple as you go in there and you say, hey, I'm reading such and such book. You know, I'm going to upload a PDF of said book. Here's my essay prompt. Give it to me. I mean, is it pretty much that straightforward? Yes. I mean, it depends on kind of the type of student, the type of class, the type of school you're going to. You know, whether or not a student thinks they can get away with that is something, or whether or not a student can get away with that is a different question.

12:01But there are plenty of students who are taking their prompt from their professor, copying and pasting it into ChatGPT and saying, I need a four - to five-page essay and copying and pasting that essay without ever reading it. One of the funniest examples I came across is a number of professors are using the so-called Trojan horse method where they're dropping in kind of these non-sequiturs into their prompts. Mention broccoli. Broccoli. Mention Dua Lipa. Say something about Finland. Into their prompts so that if you were to just copy and paste the prompt into ChatGPT, the essay that it spits out will say something about broccoli or Dua Lipa.

12:46And there are students who are just blindly copying and pasting those essays and handing them in. So not only are they not writing their papers, They're not even reading them. Well, it seems like with just a little bit of effort, you could cover that up. I mean, unless you're just so lazy that you just insert the prompt and just copy and paste whatever you get back. But if you just take a little bit of time to comb through it, you should be able to cut that stuff out and cover up the trail. And every professor I spoke to said, you know, so many of my students are using AI. And I know that so many more students are using it, and I have no idea because it can essentially write, you know, 70 % of your essay for you.

13:27And if you do that other 30 % to cover your tracks and kind of make it your own, you know, it can write you a pretty good essay. And, you know, there are these platforms, these AI detectors that, you know, there's a big debate about how effective they are, you know. And they essentially will scan an essay and say, you know, they're assigned some grade. 70 % chance that this is AI generated. And that's really just looking at the language and deciding whether or not that language is created by an LLM or an algorithm. And, you know, it doesn't account for big ideas. It doesn't, you know, catch the students who are using AI and saying, what should I write this essay about?

14:13and not doing the actual thinking themselves. And then just kind of writing, you know, it's sort of like paint by numbers at that point. Well, it reduces everyone to editors, right? You're just going in there and manipulating the language that the machine gives you. In fact, I had a conversation with, you know, the University of Florida has been eager to adopt. A lot of schools have, but University of Florida in particular, the administration's eager to adopt AI. And I had a conversation with an administrator very high up there who said to me, you know, what does your writer, what does the future of writing look like?

14:51It probably looks a lot more like editing. And he admitted that. Did you find that students are relating very differently to all of this, to these changes? What was the general vibe you got? It was a pretty wide perspective. on AI. There were students, you know, who I spoke to a student at the University of Wisconsin who said, you know, I realized AI was a problem when I would walk in, started last fall walking into the library and fully, you know, at least half of the students were using ChatGPT. And it was at that moment that she sort of started thinking about her classroom discussions and And some of the peer-reviewed essays she was reading, and students were, you know, the one example she gave that really stuck with me was she was taking some psych class, and they were talking about attachment theories.

15:52And she was like, attachment theory is something that we should all be able to talk about our own personal experiences. We all have our own attachment theory. We can talk about, you know, our relationships with our parents. That should be a great class discussion. And yet I'm sitting here in class and people are referencing studies that we haven't even covered in class. And it just makes for a really boring and unfulfilling class. And it was like that realization for her was like, oh, we have to put the brakes on here. Something is wrong. So, you know, there are students like that. And then there are students who sort of feel like they have to use AI because if they're not using AI, you know, they're at a disadvantage.

16:32and not only that, AI is going to be around no matter what for the rest of their lives. So they feel as if the college, to some extent now, is about, you know, training them to use AI. And then there are the students who are like, why not? It's something at our disposal. And, you know, we go to school to learn how to be efficient. And, you know, this is sort of, as one student put it, you know, a hackable assignment. So I might as well use it to hack. There's this guy, Roy Lee, who's an interesting character, sort of the protagonist of the piece in some ways. And he has this interesting path from community college to Columbia to startup founder.

17:16What did you make of him and his story? Sure. Roy is somebody who just has always known he wants to be a founder, and he's been laser focused on that. And so, you know, he told me about going to Columbia and using AI to cruise his way through every assignment. He just did not care about the assignments. And because he had such a winding road to Columbia, I had to stop him and say, like, why would you go through so much effort? You know, he took a gap year and then did a year at community college to get into an elite school like Columbia and then just not take advantage of it at all and not do the work.

18:01And he said, I'm here to find a co-founder and a wife. and I think he was really helpful because it's not just about his approach to AI it's just about his mindset and his idea of college being this transactional place that gets you something very specific and is kind of the stepping stone I thought that was really kind of instructive It does kind of give the game away a little bit, right? I mean, going to college it's, you know, get out of here with this business about learning Right. It's just, it's a networking activity. Right. And honestly, you know, as kind of funny or maximalist as his language or like this example is, there's truth to it.

18:46You know, college, we can get into this. It's just, you know, the idea of college as this place where you just go to grow intellectually is long gone. Yeah. No, look, it makes me a little sad, but I respect the game. I respect the honesty. Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, was that a pretty common perspective among students, especially at the more elite universities? You know, I wouldn't say it was common with the students I spoke to, but those students often sort of talked divisively, I think, about other students who had that perspective in certain majors. And kind of they would talk about their classmates in finance and some in computer science who really felt like, you know, they were there for networking.

19:36Well, Wendy was a different case. All right. So she is or she says she's against cheating. She's against copying and pasting. But of course, she's using ChatGBT. What was the story she was telling herself to justify that? Or if that's the wrong word, what was her explanation? I think Wendy was sort of the best example, kind of spoke to a lot of students' experiences where, you know, she understands the honor code as it's written. And she views cheating now as anyone who copies and pastes from ChatGPT into their Google Doc and then turns it in. And she, you know, like I was saying earlier, somebody who uses ChatGPT to formulate ideas, to come up with topic sentences, and then does that kind of paint-by-numbers essay, sits down, you know, and writes an essay in two hours that would normally take somebody six, seven, eight hours.

20:43So it's kind of hacking. And she, in my conversation with her, I just sort of realized, I think the best part about this assignment was watching students in real time kind of decide where the line is on cheating. And she hadn't really figured it out, you know, where she was nostalgic for the act of actually writing, but felt as if she wasn't cheating by outsourcing the deep thinking that essays are meant to provoke, you know, outsourcing that to an AI. She just didn't feel like it was cheating at all. I'm not sure anyone knows. Where is the line between using AI to assist and using AI to cheat?

21:30I mean, I'm very sympathetic, especially to her case, right? I mean, she's clearly someone who would rather live in a different world, but this is the world we got. And in this world, for all the reasons we've already said, this is the game and people around you are playing it. And if you're not, then you're going to be at a disadvantage. and also just setting that aside, it's just incredibly tempting. I mean, I can't. Right. How do you, I mean, how do you not? It's right there at your fingertips. You could be done in 30 minutes and hit the club or go to the ball game or whatever. You know, it's asking a lot.

22:09It's asking a lot of students to not partake. It is. It is. And I am somebody personally who, like, when ChatGPT, the version as we know it, in November 2022 came out, you know, shortly after was the first time I really played around with it. I was like, ah, it's a party trick. And I think in the course of reporting the story, I played with it a lot more to, you know, familiarize myself with it. And it was like the first time I realized, oh, if I, you know, had two paragraphs and needed a transition and I couldn't come up with it, you know, like it could offer me something. And I am, you know, much older than these students.

22:50And there was an immediate realization of like, if I start doing this now, I am going to lose something. Like some part of my brain is not going to flex and work. And that is really scary. That's scary to me. And it's enough of a deterrent that, like, I just don't want to do that. And to put that sort of, like, ask on 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds is crazy to me because, like you said, you know, they have clubs to be at or they have, you know, as one student put it, sometimes an essay just needs to get writ or something, you know. Yeah, touche. Yeah. I'm just curious, did any of Wendy or anyone else share some of their essays with you?

23:38Did you get a chance to look at them? Were they good? Were they convincing? Would they have fooled you? The Wendy moment was like the crazy moment for me. It was, you know, after our conversation, I asked her to send me the essay she had written that she talked about. And I opened the essay and it was about critical pedagogy. this theory, you know, Paulo Freire, the Brazilian thinker, on learning methods. And I went back to her and said, you know, you kind of, you have to see the irony in using AI to write about critical pedagogy. And she really first, like, just, I think, quickly flipped it on me.

24:18She's like, what do you think? And I said, no, I mean, explain this to me. And I think, you know, she had lines in the essay about, you know, learning is what makes us human. And so I asked her again about it. And she said, you know, something about like, I do think, depending on AI, you know, you're going to lose some critical thinking. But, you know, it's there. You know, AI is always going to be there for us. So we might as well be using it. Is there a case to be made, a depressing case, but true, that students who are good at using AI, and I think you alluded to this earlier, will be more prepared, actually, for the future, that, you know, prompt engineering is just going to be the new writing.

25:03And it's better to figure that out now so you can adapt. I don't know. I can't really speak at all to the nuances of that in computer science or in sciences and what you have to learn in order to get AI to do what you want. I just can't speak to it. But in terms of essay writing, it's just kind of intuitive, I think. And I don't know necessarily what you're learning by copying and pasting a prompt into ChatDBT. I mean, anybody can do that. So I don't really understand when people talk about teaching students to use AI in the arts or humanities. I still don't really know what that looks like.

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27:29let's talk about the professor perspective i mean the professors you spoke to all seem to share something pretty close to despair yes those are primarily the professors in writing heavy classes or computer science classes. You know, there were professors who I spoke to who actually were really, you know, bullish on AI. I spoke to one professor, doesn't appear in the piece, but she is at UCLA and she teaches, I believe, comparative literature and used AI to create her textbook, her entire textbook. for this class this semester, and she says it's the best class she's ever had. And so I think there are some people who are optimistic.

28:24She was an outlier in terms of the professors I spoke to. For the most part, professors were, yes, in despair. They don't know how to police AI usage, and even when they know an essay is AI-generated, the recourse there is really thorny. If you're going to accuse a student of using AI, there's no real good way to prove it. And students know this. Right. So they can always deny, deny, deny. And just the sheer volume of AI-generated essays or paragraphs is overwhelming. So that just on the surface level is extremely frustrating and has a lot of professors down. Now, if we kind of zoom out and just think also kind of about education in general, you know, this just raises a lot of really uncomfortable questions for teachers and administrators about the value of each assignment and extrapolate that out.

29:31You know, not just the value of the assignment, but the value of the degree in education in general. Yeah, I mean, look, I was a professor very briefly. and it is very easy to spot when someone hasn't authored their own work. I mean, you can kind of tell, but knowing and proving are very different things, like you were saying. And I can imagine a lot of faculty just deciding, you know what, it's not worth the hassle of making these sorts of allegations. It's not worth it, which again, I understand. But I think the end result of that is that everyone involved sort of ceases to take any of it seriously.

30:16And the whole thing just becomes completely hollowed out. Yeah, I don't, I somehow don't think we're going to police our way out of this problem. You know, one, also just like asking professors to like do the CSI sort of thing and then go for every AI-generated essay is just not sustainable. So, you know, what professors, you know, and administrators are kind of talking about is one, up front, getting students, the most important thing for them to learn at this point is like why they shouldn't be using AI and convincing them not to use AI. You know, cheating in general is the kind of research on it shows that cheating comes, you know, from a lot of different factors that we kind of all understand.