How Humans Respond When the Ground Shifts Beneath Them

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

[Introduction: As I turned on my laptop and prepared to type this essay, I switched on the seductive assemblage of the AI minds — Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Deep Seek. I was prepared to listen again to the all-AI (no humans platformed) panel discussion. AI’s Message to Humanity Before the podcast could start, I literally was hit in my face with a striking hint of our future. It was an ad for a job interview. The interviewer was a human (human power!). The job applicant was a virtual AI Agent, a male avatar with a crooked Rocky Balboa nose. I was mesmerized. Just two days ago, I had learned for the first time that Employers were using AI interviewers of human job applicants. TikTok EXPOSES Employers for Using AI in Job Interviews

Now the pattern was reversed.

The human interviewer asked the AI Agent standard questions for a job interview. How many words a minute can you type? AI Agent: 3,000 words a minute. What is your availability for work? AI Agent: I can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Vacation requests? AI Agent: I will not need vacation time. You know your colleagues might fear your presence, that you are here to take their jobs. AI Agent: I get that a lot. I am here to support humans. What are your pay requirements? AI Agent: $3.33 a day, if you can swing it.

You’re hired! Oh, what are you doing?

The AI Agent started working immediately on the spot.

If you’re curious, the sponsor of this AI Agent ad was “How to Make Sales 24/7 with Chat GPT-4” by Webclass.ai.

The world is changing. Tomorrow morning, I will talk about the meaning of AI with Psychology Professor Elizabeth Spievak. The purpose of this essay tonight is to collect and organize my thoughts for tomorrow’s podcast. There is so much to cover and so little time.]

College Students No Longer Write Essays

A few days ago, Elizabeth shocked me. And I try not to use that word too much at the age of 63. I have been around the block a few times. AI is not my first rodeo. I remember when Yahoo went public and I set up a modest trust fund filled with Yahoo stock for my younger son. He was a few days old and the year was 1997. But reading about Yahoo in Fortune Magazine did not shock me.

The MSN article Elizabeth sent me shook me. But before we get to the MSN article, consider this ad from writeless.ai which is being heavily and aggressively marketed to college students. You too can write that paper in history class but without the muss and fuss of Chat GPT. Have no fear! Writeless is undetectable by AI generators. 100% plagiarism free to boot! Claudine Gay was born too early. That was a cheap shot but I own it. Check out the link for yourself.

https://writeless.ai/

What ever happened to Integrity? To Dignity? To Pride of Authorship?

Now, let’s get to the MSN article, Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College by James D. Walsh. Don’t read the article if you are easily disappointed in the character of young people. When I attended the University of Virginia from 1979 to 1983, we were subject to a centuries-old Honor Code. One did not lie. One did not cheat. One did not steal. We lived by a code at Mr. Jefferson’s University. And if one found oneself on the wrong side of the Honor Code, there was a single sanction. Expulsion from the University.

The Honor Code and the single sanction created a high-trust environment among faculty and students. It meant something, said something, about one’s honor if one prepared for the world in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Now, we have transitioned to a zero-trust environment on colleges campuses courtesy of AI. According to the article, cheating is rampant today. hi chat I need your help writing an essay Here is the lead, topic sentence in the piece: “Chungin ‘Roy’ Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment.” The story goes downhill from there.

By his own admission, AI wrote 80% of every essay Lee turned in to his instructors. Where is your sense of self-respect, Mr. Lee? Where is your sense of dignity and self-worth? What are you learning? Why are you squandering an opportunity to sharpen your cognitive ability at an Ivy League institution? I hope to explore these questions from my moral center with Elizabeth tomorrow morning.

If Lee is putting in minimal effort, what is his return on investment from the standpoint of cognitive ability?

Let’s continue. Not content to throw away his educational ethics, Lee developed a program to enable job interviewers to cheat during job interviews. See the wisdom of the Honor Code? Honor creates trust which we need to work together. Cheating tears down trust and corrupts faith in one’s fellow man.

The more I read, the more despondent I became. Did you know that 90% of college students have used Chat GPT to complete homework assignments? And many of these uses are undetectable by AI detectors. How is rampant cheating fair to the honest and ethical 10% of students who complete homework assignments in good faith? We are in the middle of a full-blown crisis on college campuses.

I hope Elizabeth will reassure me that things are not as corrupt and beyond repair as they seem.

For a podcaster who is outright bearish on this generation of college students, see

Distortion of Reality

People use AI to create their own reality — Chat GPT 4o

And don’t get me started about racial bias and centering of black women in AI engineering. To the best of my knowledge, there are zero black female AI engineers at Chat GPT and Anthropic. Will generative AI produce images reflective of AI engineers in the real world? When I typed in “female AI engineers” as a search query on Google, I pulled up the following image:

I am sure this AI engineer is a wonderful person. However, what are the odds Goggle would produce her as a representative image of female AI engineers? Another image revealed that 25% of female AI engineers were black women. I can’t put my finger on it but it seems wrong when search queries distort reality. I appreciate that Google is not an AI system but I suspect I would get the same results with Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Deep Seek.

Data systems can reflect biases by centering black women in fields where there may be close to zero black female AI engineers. It would be nice for there to be more but I feel images should reflect reality. What do you think? [I am not trying to be funny but, out of curiosity, I typed “pioneer black lawyers” as a search query into Google. I know that there was one black female lawyer out of the first 150 pioneer black lawyers more or less between 1844 - 1879. Out of 52 images produced, 6 were black women. How does that image result make sense in a world where one out of the first 150 pioneer black lawyers was a woman? Maybe, reality doesn’t matter anymore.]

Here is a podcast that reviews issues of bias in generative AI systems:

The Dark Web of AI

Conclusion: There is so much to cover with Elizabeth — cheating on papers, AI Agents and job interviews, therapy, counseling, health, AI boyfriends and girlfriends, spiritual guru, etc. Should be fun!

Good evening!