Farid Laroussi is Professor of French in the department of French, Hispanic and Italian studies.
I wish this title were tongue-in-cheek, yet we, in the academic world, know all too well that it is too close to reality for professional comfort. We are not talking about audiences addicted to social media, but about media that corrupt — by design — the minds and social principles that bind us together, including in homes of knowledge. We are way past the spine-chilling reality that people have been wasting their lives online, hours a day, literally doing nothing except buying into feedback loops and algorithm diktats. These same mass behaviour models want to make us believe that nowadays, what we are witnessing is a new, soft democratic evolution, just like what I dub the Taylor Swift Syndrome: nonthreatening to men and “feminist” enough for women. The pop singer creates relevance about herself when everything else comes up fragmented and antagonistic. This is the reason why, despite what algorithms feed us, we need to be reminded that there is no such thing as democracy without accountability, regulations and intelligible commitment.
One wonders why generative AI corporations won’t delve into creativity outside language models that alienate users: alternate models should lead the way. Instead, it appears that AI tech companies have willingly lost the plot for common good. In a perfect world, the choice for relevant data under the rule of democratic law would be called algorithmic pluralism, where decision-points do not determine opportunities to interact and contribute mostly against social media and AI obsession with monoculture. See, for instance, Joseph Fishkin’s Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, a study in political science, which applies to tech companies and the new legal horizons. What is being squandered by our student audiences in this technological and neo-liberal economic status quo is not simply stand-in solutions, or imaginative powers, but the how-to-think (savoir penser), the tools of critical thinking for one’s own sake and for our communities. The days of COVID-19 (what I call the Wild West of higher education), when the bets were off with faculty members turning a blind eye and students working from their bedrooms with their smartphones, are behind us. Cheating has morphed from a perceived opportunity to industry-like (“exam helpers” have multiplied; AI actually writes papers for you), with little room to figure out the very meaning of being a student.
How many times have we realized with disenchantment that students are scared or unable to pen some creative assignment on their own (“Imagine a passage from Madame Bovary written from the narrative point of view of Emma”), without claiming the online prosthetics of stale, dubious narratives? This is a sign that the more we surrender our critical, intellectual competencies to algorithmic forces, the more we will become incapable of transforming anything and actually increasing knowledge. Our response in the face of generative AI is indeed a self-defeating proposition in our academic universe. How so? The learning process is compromised, the critical tools are far from mastered, the work ethics get muddled, what was perceived as a “convenience” (cheating) creates an artificial transactional sense that contaminates future credentials.
The stark reality is that AI (especially when it reaches singularity in 2027 or 2029) is about to invent a new class: the intellectual proletariat. Not the tech writers from the Global South who struggle in their neocolonial straitjackets, but our disempowered human selves. One striking example has been the shrinking of a pluralistic media environment, with algorithms that affect news content, and yet, in a more insidious way, the discoverability of news as well. We continue to believe that our brains work nicely because of their plastic prowess. However, we might be heading for a new human stage of unlearning, with dire consequences for both mental life and social fabrics.
No one is advocating for the days when intelligence and information were squeezed out of endless, privileged research, then disseminated in exclusive scholarly outlets. Today, privacy and freedom are the genuine wealth we can no longer afford to relinquish. They won’t return once we start worshipping at the feet of AI. The machine only appears to be neutral; moods and emotional patterns are derived from linguistic software. It is like tennis: if you play long enough with a beginner, your advanced level will sink. Only here we’re talking about civilizational disaster. News feeds are not science-based or thoughts; as for data, they nicely impersonate us, with tech giants such as Facebook, Google or TikTok tinkering ever more deeply with our hopes, needs or depressive states.
No need to think back to Plato’s idea of a pharmakon (simultaneously a poison and a medicine) to grasp fully the ambivalence of knowledge production and hermeneutics in our days. When I suggest that, “There is no fairness if we cannot cheat,” I underscore one truth, albeit an uncomfortable one: everyone does it. You may as well look up academic dishonesty using AI. In a weird fashion, students have come to terms with the potential power of the mechanical repetition of knowledge, with zero ethical guardrails. Technology does not “improve” or “increase” our own beings, contrary to the transhumanist mantra that the Silicon Valley pundits try to sell us. Cheating epitomizes the combined loss of critical thinking and memory. Once again, though, everyone does it, because cheating has become an economic functionality in itself.
Cheating is the norm; we see it in broad daylight with corporations that understand intellectual property laws in their own, one-sided fashion. On the other hand, work ethics and education have become weak, almost predictable casualties. Cultural analysis and intellectual innovation are slowly migrating outside academic institutions, in decentralized digital spaces where everything becomes possible — the good and the ugly. As for those of us still committed to academic work and pedagogical dedication, we witness first-hand that sometimes, cheating starts at the level of the academic application, with a whole industry dedicated to producing polished resumes, aced essays and stunning portfolios cultivated in the rich topsoil of parental anxiety. What was opaque at the onset of academic life becomes standard and predictable.
Once you get caught in that fraught industry of academic top marks and “outstanding” graduate theses, your education has virtually no value. This is just another instance of how technology in the digital age slowly crushes consciences and individual performance alongside the economic future. Basically, cheaters fail to see that they are caught in a vicious arms race: How smart is it to churn out generations of poorly educated students when they will prove incapable of generating, say, more science and technology? When generative AI dominates, our experience of the world and life itself will be severely transformed. For instance, the psycho-power of former mainstream media (being passive in front of the television six o’clock news) has morphed into a neuro-power with AI, altering behaviour, memory, cognitive responses and attention levels. We won’t need to know the weighting of variables or how to deconstruct software. It is irrelevant to lament the pros and cons of AI (tremendous medical leaps versus surveillance society, for example) if we do not understand the industrial politics behind it. Cheating showcases what these policies can do to us individually (erasing moral qualms) and collectively (embracing wilful servitude). The cheating paradigm conceals an ideology for a new world that manufactures mimetic and competitive expectations for its own sake. Obsolescence shall be us, unless …
Author's Note: "Singularity" was first coined in 1948 by mathematician John von Neumann. The concept basically means that technological progress and knowledge will become exponentially rapid, irreversible and beyond human capacity to understand or challenge.
This is an opinion essay. It reflects the contributor’s views and may not reflect the views of The Ubyssey as a whole. Contribute to the conversation by visiting ubyssey.ca/pages/submit-an-opinion.
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