By Eric Le Roy
There comes a certain point when, having fought the good fight and, further resistance being futile, one walks willingly to the stake and allows oneself to be fettered and set afire. This is the moment of total capitulation and surrender, whether it be to the ecstatic bottomless pit of the orgasm or asphyxiation by the zombies and mummies of death.
It’s the state of total release I imagine is experienced by suicides who fling themselves from high windows, the condemned at the point of execution, the lamb in the jaws of the wolf. And…by the English teacher who understands, with crushing clarity, that future student essays will pass under the infallible ball-bearing eye and unswerving symmetry of Artificial Intelligence.
Bound to my vocation (English tutor), I sense the inevitable patrol of AI apps surrounding me more and more, like spies appearing everywhere from behind the corners of totalitarian cities, the lean shadows they cast tacitly informing me that my incarceration will be soon, after the final documents are accumulated.
It is hard to resist the impulse, like that of a long-distance runner who, gasping, collapses on the track, and the drowning animal who finally just gives in to the dream…to permit oneself the strange joy of abject and total release. The macabre pleasure of the moment of death, when the last glimpse of what life was freezes up like florid squiggles on a cave wall or an oily masterpiece stiffened in a museum frame.
The liberation of defeat. Well, these elaborations have nothing to do with real physical death. I am speaking of the point you reach when you understand that everything you believed in is now regarded as an anachronism, your painfully hand-crafted toolkit full of obsolete instruments, and the integrity on which you based at least the most profoundly important aspects of your life, now the subject of mirthful elbows planted jocularly in the ribs of your ‘colleagues’ as they smile condescendingly at your out-of-touch naivete’.
OK, let’s cut to the chase. I am a writer. I like to think I am a good one; God help me if I am not, given the years I have spent trying. I have had four books published. No, they are not best-sellers, nor were they designed to be. Mostly they are ‘meditations – often raucous to the point of obscenity but just as likely to be saturated with the drippings of the catacombs and bluff cliffs my spirit has wandered on and, so far, returned from. I have relived my life through these works, and I have earned the right to call myself an ‘artist’. Or I will do so anyway. Whatever the case, this work is entirely my own. No machine has ‘fixed’ it or done it for me. I am fiercely proud of that. Fuck-up that I have been in many respects, in this one theater I have been 100% real and honest.
What I see around me, everywhere, not just with students, but with professionals too, is what I must describe as fraudulence. People simply cheat, and there is no other way to describe it. (Which will lead to a second issue I want to raise later.) They claim ownership of something that is either not entirely theirs or, in the worst cases, a slithering attempt at deception and (which is the real pits) self-glorification. Moreover, most people feel no guilt whatsoever in this regard. They believe that they are doing nothing worse than making the most of the implements at their disposal, and to do otherwise would be foolish. What is the difference, they demand to know, between a human editor (in which capacity I have served many times) and a mechanical AI editor, which, Oh, by the way, can do the work at nano speed and even more efficiently?
The sharpest among them make indisputable analogies, such as comparing the old ways of doing the laundry (Buckets and Baskets) and the modern ways (Washers and Dryers). Why, they ask, earnestly and incredulously, would anyone want to waste precious time doing something themselves when a robot can do it better? Why walk when you can fly?
To me, the tragedy rests in the beaming, almost gloating, sense of Victory with which they salute themselves. “Why should I bother…!” – they grin, glancing meaningfully at their Smart Gadget.
I try to respond by preaching the virtues of intricate craftsmanship over mass production – and, sooner or later, I allow words such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘integrity’ to escape my lips – but I understand that the world is no longer listening. They are no longer listening. Which, as an individual attempting to be fair, I have to ask myself: Am I being unreasonable? Is it because I speak of creative or expository writing, and I am threatened by a loss of autonomy as a creator? In other words, would I object if bankers and secretaries resorted to AI to make their documents presentable?
After all, I give little more than a passing thought to people in other professions whose expertise is now nullified and whose value is diminished by AI. I do think about it, and I don’t like it…but what to do? It’s not that I am afraid of losing my job. I’m 76 already and just work for the joy and augmented income. I don’t much care if real teachers or machines teach future pupils.
In this sense, I throw up my hands and, as I alluded to at the start of this essay, I simply give myself over to the hangman or the shark. The cravenly but oddly delicious moment when you just say, “FUCK EVERYBODY!” Try it sometime and tell me if it doesn’t feel good. Just walk off the fucking job and go fishing or to the gym or the massage parlor. Unleash your inner ape. There is even a name for it: Primal Scream Therapy. F-u-u-u-u–c-c-c-k-k-k-k Y-O-U !!!!
Well, that’s one of the available options, isn’t it – when you know you’re fighting a losing battle. Or – as I have – you draw a circle around yourself – like a spherical tumour-eating laser beam – and say This is my fortress, my monastery, my studio, my sanctuary, and ultimately, my courtroom – overwhich I preside both as a judge known for his austerity and harsh punishments, and as a defendant guilty of crimes of self-inflicted humiliation and weakness and cowardice. Out of the circle, all bets are off. Get drunk. Go to the race track. Bet your ass on a sure winner and watch him finish last. But within that circle, which I have chosen as my cell, I have to be authentic….or I am damned, I am nothing.
So I look with regret at student papers that have been produced artificially, but I see that raising cane about it is just hot air, and I am reminded of the three ways to use the word moral: they are ‘moral’, ‘immoral’, and ‘amoral’. If you are ‘moral’, you study and accept the recipe for goodness that you are convinced you should adhere to, and you do not stray. If you are ‘immoral’, it means that you acknowledge that what you are doing is wrong, but you do it anyway. This is where guilt retains a chance of influencing the confessed wrongdoer. But ‘amoral’ means that you do not accept the rules-and-regs of morality in the first place; ergo, your ‘bad’ behavior cannot be defined as ‘immoral’. You don’t accept any of it; hence, you have no intention of succumbing to any judgment based on the dictates of the orthodoxy of the official morality. Right away we are back to FUCK YOU.
And that’s today’s bad news, guys. We live in a FUCK YOU world. Liberated from Evil, we become the Flunkies of Indifference. The Age of Attitude. The Ask me if I Give a Shit multitude. If you look at a photo of a rock group shilling their newest album (do they still call it that?), you don’t see a band of charming smiles indicating delight taken in the prospect of entertaining you. What you get is a bunch of snot-nosed, glaring, half-junkie looking dickheads who want to kill you. Tighten Up, Bitch. You dissin’ me, man? Where’s my goddamned Glock?
Ah, those kids.
Old-fashioned that I may be, I look at a world in which, for all the ridiculous warhoops involving ‘identity politics’, most people have no real sense of the difference between fact and fantasy, reality and image. The lines are becoming increasingly blurred. Amazingly (in my view), there seems to be very little awareness, rebellion, or push-back against the AI-driven forfeiture of self that many people, among them some of the most extremely talented, have blithely flung themselves into like the Charge of the Light Brigade.
They don’t look back. Or is it that they have left behind, like discarded garments strewn about the floor, some beautiful essence, some refulgent source, that once could brighten the lighthouses of their brains? Have these people lost something within themselves that they would have been better off keeping?
Or is it just situational? In the past, I have cheated on exams when the opportunity presented itself, but only if it was in something I didn’t care about – like Geography or Botany. If the teacher said ‘Write an essay”, I would never cheat because the individual creativity required to outdo all others was central to who I was and still am. I would not cheat at what mattered most: my Art. Would I steal stuff from companies and shops? Guilty. Would I be unfaithful to my partner or compromise my loyalty to a friend? On occasion. Did I feel guilty? Of course, but not guilty enough to stop myself from doing it. And, indeed, there is truth in the adage that ‘the only crime is getting caught. Think about that one. No body, no murder.
In these ways, I have also been a bad guy. A jerk. So, how dare I have a go at someone who uses a machine to enhance their essay? Conclusion: Maybe I am wrong?
Nevertheless, there continues to be some itch I keep having, some insect bite I keep getting, that tells me, while it is bad to steal something and keep it as yours, it is worse to steal someone else’s idea (plagiarism) and pretend it is yours – or let a machine do the dirty work and claim authorship. One makes you a crook; the other makes you a fraud.
I recently ended a friendship with a Russian guy who lives in America and whom I have known for 10 years. About 6 years ago, he enticed me to write a book for him. He called it a collaboration, but I did all the writing. He couldn’t. Nor, at the end, was he even willing to read it. Too lazy. Then he met some Russian mountainman wayfarer monk who bedazzled him, and he suddenly decided that the whole book needed to be rewritten with this Tolstoy look-alike as the central figure. Fed up, I offered only to filter his new hero in at certain strategic points. That too came to nothing. Returning to the first version, I decided the best way to finish it would be to describe his early impressions of America after he first arrived, supposedly to enroll in Wharton Business School. Or College, whichever it is. Straight from the horse’s mouth, I was thinking. (“I did it MY WAY” – as he had insisted on stating in the preface. I wondered where that came from? Chuckle, chuckle.) What better to round off the book than with his own coronation? He refused (had he been lying all along?) – and the project died. Aborted – or stillborn from the start.
Later, he had a couple more half-baked ideas that never came to fruition, and finally, he decided to produce a book about how to start a ‘Start-Up’. He sent me an AI-generated offering of ‘different voices’, such as very chatty and informal (full of slang), slightly more conventional, and on down the line until very formal, like an academic ‘paper’. It was nothing but AI sample texts through and through, and he asked me to choose which voice was ‘his’. That is, an AI ‘voice’ (as in writing) that he could claim as his own. I understood the bullshit perfectly well, but went along with it. So a short while later, he presented me with the penultimate ‘draft’ of the book about Start-Ups for my final editing, and in the course of conversation proudly announced (while giving lip service to his ‘team’): “Of course, I am the author.”
Bollocks.
When I told him that, no, in fact, he wasn’t the author, a quarrel ensued which became very unpleasant indeed. I told him, “You are a fraud.” Which he most definitely is.
The savagery with which he defended his ‘integrity’ was a thing of comic beauty. He should have been onstage in the Globe Theatre. But I am sure that, wounded and furious, he has convinced himself that he has done nothing wrong. And in his capacity for subterfuge and self-deceit, he will end up as a Legend in his Own Mind. Indisputably a Trailblazer (which is how he has always fashioned himself, if you are beginning to comprehend his Napoleonic character). So, in my view, what he was trying to pull off, including describing himself, falsely, as a “renowned digital entrepreneur and angel investor’ amounted to nothing more than the conniving of a shameless trickster.
Yet to my amazement, when I ‘shared’ this with a few other corporate people, just to get their reaction, a lot of them defended him. “If the technology is there, why shouldn’t he use it?” – was always the gist of it. It’s just a sign of the times, and there is nothing I can do to change the minds of people who have brazenly arrived at artificial answers to life.
At this point, I want to quote the words of one of my young Chinese students. He wrote on this very subject, and this is part of what he had to say:
However, cheating can have negative impacts to students who insist on trying it. Your creativity dilates. The Brain Atrophy effect points out that cheating bypasses the struggle phase. For example, a kid who designed a whole plagiarized portfolio saw it backfire when he couldn’t think of any original ideas once he was on the job, so he was subsequently fired. Also, cheating prevents you from failing, but failing is crucial for creativity. Scientists who embrace or accept failure make 2.3X more breakthroughs than people who fear failure. Cheaters, on the other hand, have 68% higher fear of failure than normal people do. Besides, teamwork creativity is lost when we cheat. For instance, a tech startup collapsed after its co-founder was found to be unethical, and the investors didn’t trust the team. One small element of cheating may cause the whole plan to fall apart or render it unable to be used again. Finally, when we use AI for writing during an imagination writing task, the part you would normally be trying to think of or to imagine will have been done by AI, and slowly, you will not have enough creativity to hold your brain. In short, if you cheat, your creativity dilates over time.
Besides, cheating may affect how you think. First of all, cheating diminishes problem-solving skills. Cheating bypasses the part when we struggle, and critical thinking comes. For example, a programmer who copied code in school struggled to complete his attempt to produce original work later, costing him a promotion. His action of cheating has bad consequences. Additionally, cheating will drive addiction to internet apps that encourage cheating. Human beings might have AI dependency because students will always use ChatGpt for assignments. According to data, there is a decline of 36% after writing with AI for 6 months. It also increases your anxiety when you are forced to think independently. That is caused by an untrained ‘hippocampus’ (part of your memory faculty), which will lead to weaker memory retention. In addition, the cheater will always overestimate their own ability because they have never tested their real limits. 73% of cheating students falsely believed they could pass exams honestly, but they didn’t succeed. Medical students who cheated on anatomy exams made 3X more errors during residency. In brief, cheating leads to thinking dependence.
Furthermore, there are inequalities during cheating. Wealthy students can afford bribes, private tutors, or high-tech cheating tools. For example, in the 2019 U.S. College Admission Scandal, people with wealthy backgrounds paid up $500,000 to post fake scores and strengthen their profiles. On the other hand, low-income students will not be able to afford this, so this is a form of inequality. For example, in China, the cheating mafias charge up to $10,000 for GaoKao exam leaks, pricing out poor students. Skewed meritocracy also created a huge problem. Cheaters steal spots from a candidate who deserves to have it. For example, a student bribed his way to USC, and it turns out he stole another candidate’s spot. Cheating materials also widen the educational gap. For instance, in India’s Bihar, a vast amount of cheating tools disproportionately affect rural kids who don’t have good-quality schools. Also, wealthy students may use undetectable AI tools while the poor ones depend on themselves or resort to a paper cheat sheet, which is a lot riskier. In short, there are inequalities during cheating.
So there you have it, right from the mouth of a 12-year-old boy.. An ethical boy. How long will he remain so, withstanding the temptation to cheat, especially when doing so will cause others to ‘shame’ him only if he gets caught?
As for me, don’t drop your wallet in the street if I happen to be coming behind you. But if you want to read a human-made book, I might be your guy. Last of a dying breed? Not really, because the world is still vibrant with authentic people. However, Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to write better than we can, so, alas, my last feeble claim to uniqueness will be dismantled, will go between the jaws of the Great Algorithm. So, To the Silo, Old Man !
Maybe I will call back: Remember the Alamo!. Or something.
AI fascinates me, and I have written about it many times before. So it’s not a ‘pooh-ooh’ stance I am taking. I fully believe that it is valid to use AI as an assistant –like an editor – if you are writing serious text. (Office memos, do what the hell you like, it’s not important). But DON’T use it as a substitute for yourself, because if you do, you are a Freeloading Phony.
Your choice. You know, back when Brigitte Bardot was the hottest nymph on earth, a philosopher I knew posed this question: Eric, suppose you could have really fucked Brigitte Bardot but nobody would ever know about it, or you DIDN’T fuck her, but everyone thought you HAD – what would you choose?
I have contemplated that question for many years, and now I know my choice. How about you?
As a matter of fact, in my case, two of us would know, wouldn’t they? And I’d settle for that, just as today I insist on giving you the straight dope, usually without capitulating to the normal constraints of courtesy when a fever is in my mind.
I listen to the piping of pagan birds and go try to reproduce their song on an ancient stage, my mouth foaming, my voice slapping among the rocks of a mostly empty amphitheatre like the muttering of monks gone mad. I am out of date.
