Cheaters prospered before AI made it easy

The academy was broken before ChatGPT made essay assignments look pointless

Tomas McIntee
6 min readNov 30, 2023

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For most of the past academic year, educators and academics have been grappling with how to handle the rise of powerful and effective large language models (LLMs), a form of artificial intelligence that can write essays better than the typical college sophomore. Methods for detecting AI-generated work are unreliable and are also generally likely to be obsolete after the next few development cycles.

Promotional poster for the 1991 independent film “Cheating, Inc.” (Source.)

The problem with focusing on new AI tools like ChatGPT: Cheating was already a growing and largely unaddressed problem within the academy.

ChatGPT and other LLMs didn’t create a new problem; it disrupted a large and rapidly-growing industry in academic dishonesty that had paying clients at every level from Algebra I to post-doctoral tenure review. Cheating was already difficult to detect, and had already become widespread.

The naked emperor of education

Over the course of the past three or four decades or so, education and academia have systematically changed in multiple ways that have made it easier for cheaters to prosper. The emperor of education had already donned a set of non-existent new clothes. Proctored and structured…

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Tomas McIntee

Dr. Tomas McIntee is a mathematician and occasional social scientist with stray degrees in physics and philosophy.