For a period of time, school was a nightmare for children. Some Silent Generation folks still remember being in a poorly-climate controlled room with twenty other children and expected to sit quietly for six to eight hours at a time, possibly while hungry or tired. The teachers could hit children. Children with learning disabilities that made reading paragraphs or understanding math equations difficult were often left to struggle upstream and feel stupid about it, if they could not afford or find a tutor. Teachers did not necessarily have ‘mandated reporter’ training, and the idea of peanut allergies was laughable if only because most of the kids who had it badly enough had likely already been crippled or killed by cross contamination before they even got to go to school.
Yes, for a period of time, the worst of all previous systems coalesced into one place, where standards were rigorous, failure was all too possible, kids were responsible for a lot and given relatively few privileges to match that responsibility, and the environment was stifling rather than nurturing.
There are problems with the modern school system, yes, but taken overall, the modern system is better than everything that has come so far. This isn’t to say it’s flawless, however, and now we’re seeing the result of one of the most glaring flaws of modern schooling.
The Glaring Flaw
A concerning sort of attitude popped up around the time schools began measuring their success by test score alone. ‘Intellect is a product you go to school to acquire’. This intellect product is represented by diplomas and makes students more hirable. True, it’s tough to measure a student’s ability to think critically, and a test score should at least in theory tell teachers what broad areas a kid might be struggling with, but ultimately this was a terrible downturn for education wherever the test score model overtook the old ways. Teachers were slowly pushed to focus on test scores before actual comprehension; to make test scores, learning modules made in one sort of classroom were pushed out to everyone in every sort, whether it fit or not; clear ideas were traded for easy answers and quicker turnaround on practice tests.
Things get rough again. Students are once again asked to shoulder more responsibility without more privilege to go with it. Kids are given huge amounts of homework, and it gets worse the higher they are in their grade, the opposite of what should be happening when in theory they should also be starting their first jobs or looking into internships.
It’s a system that applies a ton of pressure to achieve a good result at a few given points. Midterms, exams, maybe a key essay or two, maybe some projects designed to encourage teamwork, but in the grand scheme of a semester or year, this is a string of flash-in-the-pan assignments that actually matter mixed in with busywork that may or may not hone skill.
Cheating here is not a difficult leap to make: the student either does really understand the concept, or they think they do, so they have an AI do the homework because they don’t see the value in it when they already understand it. They have an essay, and they’re busy with sports, chores, or a job, so they have an AI ‘help them out’ and generate that essay for them. They need something, feel the system is unfair, and rather than allow their grades to suffer they have someone or something else do it for them.
The Idea of the Product
To be clear, buying essays and cheating through school have been problems for a while. AI did not invent the concept of cheating. What it does is enable cheating faster and better than ever before.
People cheat at things they’re ‘supposed’ to be doing for many reasons. Maybe they don’t want to do it, but they have to do it, and the consequences are not actually that great if it were to ever come out that they cheated. Content creators ‘cheat’ at their job all the time by copying ideas and sources from other videos, leading to a circle of content that fails to say anything new. Sometimes people don’t want to cheat at things, but don’t see another option. In theory, your elected politicians will always read and always fully understand what it is they’re voting on, but the reality is that they don’t always get a chance. Sometimes a thousand-page bill is about to hit the floor, and they have four business days to read it, and they simply cannot do that and manage all of the other responsibilities they need to attend to.
The mismatch of the concrete number with the abstract is the blame. The concrete number of ‘my video has ten sources’, ‘this essay with my name on it got a B+’, ‘the bill contains x instances of the word ‘tax’, does not match with the abstract goals of ‘my video is well researched’, ‘I understood the content the teacher talked about’, and ‘this bill fundamentally alters the way the state collects its taxes’. The measurement has changed the thing it was supposed to measure. Worse, because of what it’s changing, it’s also causing an increase in test scores but a decrease in general understanding that’s going to be shaking out over several generations. Whether people adapt or get left behind and then forced to adapt will also change: AI is here now, and it’s supposed to shore up the flaws caused by the things that make people cheat. So the next thing generative AI is supposed to be able to do is read and summarize, because the potential customers of this product are slowly losing that ability because of the cheating, and because of the pressures that lead to the cheating in the first place.
A Place That Doesn’t Even Ask For Cheating
This attitude spans into spaces that don’t even have any demand at all for ‘cheating’! Artists generally enjoy producing their art. The struggle comes from selling it. AI artists (or ‘artists’ depending on what camp you sit in) are often great at selling but lack the artistic skill to make the art they want to make without the generative program. The problems with generated art are numerous: the lack of care when it came to sourcing, the bias built into the system that has to be manually course-corrected in the prompt, the energy it takes to create the finished generation, the sneering it inspires from fanatics. But, in theory, most of these are solvable: source fairly, use free works or buy the rights to works that aren’t free; understand the inputs better, and balance them on that side rather than after the black box; use renewable energy and improve the models so they take less in the first place.
The last one is the big sticking point. What is art? Is everything art? Is nothing truly art? Can art be soulless, and if so – who decides what’s too soulless to go in a particular gallery or museum? Is the museum of advertising making a political statement by saying ‘yes, this box art was made by someone working for a corporate giant, but it is art’?
Litigating what art is has clearly been unproductive. There are many, many answers to all of these questions, and they’re all frustratingly vague. Quick, kneejerk answers or fan-favorite Twitter comebacks fail to capture the idea. There simply is no easy answer. It’s like trying to litigate what exactly counts as a fish and what doesn’t.
But, a subset of people online who have bought deeply into AI superiority seem to believe art is ultimately a product that has come unmoored from the actual value it provides or the cost of making it, which can be boiled down to man hours spent painting, materials invested, and the skill of the artist. “Good Art” is often thought of as the most realistic, most dramatic Renaissance paintings of the most ‘worthy’ subject matter. They don’t care about any of the ‘bad’ art at all!
‘Of course it’s okay to harvest tons of content from people who didn’t agree to that when they posted it. They weren’t really skilled/their art wasn’t good enough as-is to deserve protection/they weren’t making the art I really wanted to see from their style’, this attitude seems to say. The idea that anyone can make a living off of art at all seems like an anomaly under this system, and many blame the lack of a comeback of Renaissance-full-detail on pretentious modern art taking up all the space. This new development combines the best of both worlds to them – impossibly detailed paintings at your fingertips for free while artists have to find a ‘real’ job. Art is a product that was being overcharged for, not a real aspect of human civilization going back tens of thousands of years. There’s no reason to cheat here – unless you think someone else was already cheating.
