FOR TODAY'S STUDENT, THE temptation to cheat is at an all-time high, with AI tools making it easier than ever. In one recent class at Brown University, an economics class of 86 students, students scored higher on the (take-home) midterm exam than ever before: with an average score of 96 percent. Only 5 students out of 86 scored below 90 percent on the midterm: in a class where midterm scores had never exceeded 80 percent before. Strongly suspecting cheating, the professor announced that the final would be in-person instead.
18 students dropped the class. 9 students didn’t show up for the final. And of the 59 who took the final, the average score was 48.6 percent, with only one student achieving a score of 90 percent or more. The professor, Roberto Serrano, put it bluntly:
“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK. That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”
Despite all that AI can actually do, the most dangerous thing it can do is erode our skills: a real danger if we outsource our actual learning, our critical thinking, and the time we spend struggling with puzzles and problems to a tool that purports to do it for us. This is not a new problem, but merely one that has worsened in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs). In fact, Einstein warned about this problem himself, leading us to be confident that if he had been around for the modern era, Einstein wouldn’t have used AI at all. Here’s how we know.
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