1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think.

2) Normalizing cheating in one domain normalizes it in other domains too.

There are lots of ways to use AI to improve your thinking (e.g., ask an AI to critique a belief you hold or to help you explore points on all sides of a debated issue). But when a teacher says, “Write this without AI,” and you have an AI write the essay, it’s preventing you from engaging in significant thinking.

Thinking well involves a number of components, such as:

– gathering evidence
– considering arguments
– formulating a viewpoint
– honing your viewpoint
– presenting your viewpoint clearly

Replacing thinking with AI is not analogous to replacing doing multiplication with a calculator. That’s a memorized algorithm. Thinking well, on the other hand, is core to understanding the world, figuring out what goals to set, not being duped by others, and many other essential aspects of life.

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on June 5, 2025.

They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI’s inaction damages the academic environment – especially for the non-cheating students, but even for the cheaters, too.

You’ve got to prove you can be trusted to do the right thing in small instances before you can be a candidate for being trusted to do the right thing in big instances. I hope OpenAI will get their act together and do the right thing. This is not a hard test, but so far, they’ve failed it. I hope they will pass by releasing it ASAP.

Here are my responses to the most common objections to my points that I’m seeing in the comments:

Objection 1: It’s impossible to detect whether something is written by AI: this is untrue. The technology has already been developed, and it uses watermarking. The token generation process is modified so that you can detect which AI wrote the text, even if sentences are re-ordered, or some words are swapped. Of course, with sufficient editing, the watermark will be gone.

Objection 2: Kids will just switch to other AIs in order to cheat: some will, but even small behavioral barriers making something more difficult can cause big changes in the frequency of a behavior. Additionally, it will raise the chance of being caught quite a bit, which can also have big behavioral consequences. Finally, OpenAI really should work with the other top AI companies to produce watermarking standards so that all the top AI companies include watermarking.

Objection 3: Eventually, this tech will get beaten, so there is no point: that is a weak argument. Every spam filter gets beaten by some spammers, but the solution is not to give up on spam detection; it’s to continually evolve the methods to keep spam at a minimum. Similarly, it’s better to have a dynamic situation where cheating isn’t so easy and the risk of getting caught cheating isn’t that low.

Objection 4: Essay writing is an antiquated skill now that we have AI: the purpose of learning to write essays is to practice thinking clearly and communicating. It’s an extremely bad idea to stop teaching kids how to think clearly and communicate well. Yes, in real life, they can use AI assistance, but they still need to practice thinking and communicating – outsourcing these critical skills to AI instead of learning them yourself is a very unwise idea.

This piece was first written on August 4, 2024, and first appeared on my website on August 25, 2024.

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4).

Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years:

#1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and you often won’t know if you’re reading something written by a human.

#2: Search engines will generate answers to your questions on the fly (from scratch) instead of just showing a list of websites to you and instead of using pre-extracted answers. Google will have to adapt, or it may finally lose its dominance.

#3: Cheating on school essays will become rampant, as AIs will be able to get students good grades in many classes (at negligible cost), and it will be very hard to detect such cheating since each essay will be unique.

#4: You will be able to train an AI on samples of your own writing, give it a new essay title and a bulleted list of points you want to make in the essay, and it will write a pretty high-quality essay covering all the points you listed, in a style that matches your own writing.

#5: Spam messages (and text-based phishing attacks) will become unique. Rather than sending the same message to each person, spam will be unique for each recipient. And it may even have its style adapted to what is known about each recipient (e.g., demographics).

#6: Propaganda on social media will start to become automated. Rather than bad actors having hundreds of people on their payroll to promote a viewpoint, they’ll replace them with larger swarms of human-seeming bots that each act uniquely.

#7: AIs will be fine-tuned on our own personal email corpus, and then (much of the time) you’ll be able to start with an automatically generated first draft of email replies rather than having to write emails from scratch or receiving mere sentence-level suggestions.

#8: The text of ads will get automatically edited/rewritten by AI to be fine-tuned to different audiences to help maximize clicks.

#9: AIs will start being used in education as digital private tutors to explain concepts to students, re-explain things and simplify explanations when a student is confused, point out mistakes made by students, etc.

We’re entering a wild time when it comes to AI. Its effects on our lives will be felt more and more, to say the least.

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.