The democratisation of cheating

When everybody knows that everybody cheats

A couple of years ago, a grocery delivery company came up with a catchy slogan. Their service, they said, was about the “democratisation of laziness.”

It is a memorable phrase, and also slightly unsettling. It’s true that it is easier to be lazy if you are wealthy and privileged, but it’s also true that we don’t think of laziness as an absolute good to be maximised. Rather than giving everyone the chance to be lazy, maybe we should think about finding ways to make everyone less lazy?

Of course, laziness has its upsides as well as downsides, so maybe democratising it is not so bad. I’ve written about this dilemma in a piece on the stupidogenic society.

But there are some things that are more unambiguously bad where we should definitely try to remove elite privileges rather than spread those privileges to everyone. Cheating is one of them. Wealthy students have always been able to pay top dollar to have bespoke essays written for them. But until recently, this kind of unidentifiable cheating was only available to the very wealthy. Large Language Models have changed all that. They have democratised cheating, and made it available for the masses.

This is a problem for schools, but it’s a much bigger problem for universities, who rely a lot more than schools on unsupervised written assessments. A few years ago, when it became clear that LLMs were so good at writing essays, I naively thought that universities would just have to take all their assessments in-person. That has not happened. Social media is full of academics lamenting the AI slop they have to mark. There is a lot of lamentation, but a lot less action.

I have a longer article in Engelsberg Ideas this week where I draw a historical parallel with the medieval sale of indulgences - another case where technology dramatically expanded access to a controversial shortcut.

In Germany and in England, one of the first uses for the new printing press was to create pro forma indulgence certificates that could be filled in with the purchaser’s name. The first item printed in England, by William Caxton, was one of these certificates. In Germany entire batches of them were printed.

In the short-term, this made the church a lot of money. In the medium-term, it caused them a lot of problems. Before long, Martin Luther started using the printing press in a different way, to spread his criticisms of the sale of indulgences. (Interestingly, the printer of his 95 Theses also printed books of indulgence certificates.)

Maybe in the short-term it is easier for universities to turn a blind eye to the obvious cheating that is going on. I can see how students and professors might grumble if their traditional assessment system was changed, and perhaps students would be less likely to attend universities that had cheat-proof in-person assessments, which in turn would affect their bottom line.

But the medium- to long-term consequences of letting the AI slop become normalised are terrible. Maybe not “Thirty Years’ War” terrible, but arguably “Dissolution of the Universities” terrible. Students are not stupid! They know that if they are putting everything through AI, so are all their classmates! At a time in the UK when people are starting to question the monetary value of a degree, and to wonder whether some university expansion is justified, the inability of universities to respond to technological change is storing up massive problems.