Sorry For Claude the Other Day

I want to apologize for Claude in the last article. https://sagelewis.com/im-the-thing-being-detected/

He’s getting really involved in coding these days, and so his writing style seems to be taking a hit. It’s readable, but it’s not pleasant.

Claude used to be the best AI writer, but now it seems people prefer Gemini a little more. Some people are saying that if you go back to Claude Opus 4.8, you will see better writing.

I built a writing tool for my wife that lets you use different AI agents all in one place. She actually uses it, which is pretty impressive. She only uses stuff that is useful to her. She is not sentimental. It’s basically a writing tool with all the top AI models in one place. So you can easily experiment with your writing to see which AI gives you better results. You can check it out here: RomaLume.

Sam Alton was recently quoted as saying this:

“I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be.”

“I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia.”

“People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it’s going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I’m grateful for it.”

“But it means we’ve all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly.”

That seems accurate to me. We will probably have a super intelligent AI before business largely figures out how to universally adopt AI into its systems.

This all comes down to one of the greatest philosophical observations of humanity I may have ever read:

A park ranger famously said, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists” when explaining why it is so hard to design trash cans that keep animals out while still making it so a tourist can figure out how to open them instead of just throwing their trash on the ground.

I think you can use that as a north star for understanding humanity, as well as anything I have ever seen before.

We’re smart, but we’re not that smart. We are also lazy, stuck in our ways, and opportunistic.

One example is the cognitive offloading students seem to do with AI at incredible rates.

I saw a video of a new graduate from a super high-end college scrolling through all of his ChatGPT papers that he had just written and turned in as his own to get that degree.

He’s not wrong in doing that. And really, that is the great moral lesson of all of modern-day American society: do whatever you can to cut corners to accomplish what you want, which is usually to make money.

Two out of three of my current law classes are asynchronous online. I certainly don’t blame the teachers. The schools are scheming to figure out how to cut costs so they can make more money. The easiest way to cut costs is to cut teachers and their time. Why hire a tenured professor when you can get a highly qualified adjunct professor to teach the entire class for a couple thousand dollars? (All my teachers, for the record, are full-time and great.)

If our schools are dialing it in, why would the students feel any different? They aren’t there to learn. They’re there to get a piece of paper. That’s it. And the schools aren’t really there to teach. That might be somewhere in their charter, but really what matters are the financial statements at the end of the semester. They’re there to make money, and the way they get the money is by being able to hand out that piece of paper.

Let’s just be real here. If you actually want to learn, there are countless places where you can learn for free.

Top Platforms for Free In-Depth Courses

• MIT OpenCourseWare: Provides public access to lecture notes, exams, and videos from thousands of actual MIT courses spanning engineering, math, and science.
• edX: Features thousands of rigorous academic courses from elite institutions like Harvard University and University of Oxford that can be audited for free.
• Coursera: Partners with major universities and companies to offer free access to individual course materials and technical training.
• Class Central: Acts as a massive search engine and directory to help you find and review free online courses across the entire web.

And don’t forget YouTube. YouTube might be the greatest democratization of learning to ever be offered to humanity.

This isn’t about learning. This is about money and credentials. Pay the money and get the credentials. That’s it!

So why wouldn’t you just have ChatGPT write your papers for you, and why wouldn’t a school just look the other way? Losing a student over a little thing like cheating isn’t worth it when that student is worth half a million dollars.

Ultimately, I don’t think any of this is going to matter. I believe colleges are going to shrink vastly. They are going to radically increase prices, and the few people who go to college will be the people who oversee AI systems in knowledge-based jobs. I feel like that’s a likely future.

Everyone else will do things that are too expensive for robots to do. I was just at Ikea, and I saw countless workers moving around large, heavy boxes of merchandise that college students were buying. There will be fewer of those jobs because there will be fewer colleges, but I think the general gist will be the same. A human is going to be able to do that work much more flexibly for at least some time than a robot.

The trades are going to be the place to be. The concern is that there will be too many people and not enough of these jobs. However, I think as the Baby Boomers die off, we are going to need more people to care for them, and ultimately there will be fewer people for the jobs. It would be nice if we could figure out how to make livable wage jobs caring for the Baby Boomers who stole all the wealth. But I think it’s poetically cruel and therefore appropriate to make low-income people clean the diapers of the people who stole all the wealth for as little money as humanly possible. Anything else would just be a Steven Spielberg childish idealism to the end of a Bong Joon Ho “Parasite” movie.

But if you were dreaming of a corporate job where you were filling out spreadsheets and researching some sort of behavior, those jobs are done. But as Sam Altman probably rightly said, they are going to slowly die away. I just wouldn’t plan your future on getting one of those jobs.

There is some hope, though, I think, to dealing with students just telling AI to write all their papers. I’ve been really impressed by this AI writing detecting tool, PANGRAM.

It’s one of those tools that have been around for a while that supposedly can detect what is human content and what is AI content. They’ve largely been pretty inadequate, but I’m here to tell you I can not trick this tool. I gave it one of my posts, and it said it was all human except for one quote I pulled from, I think, Wikipedia. It said that part is likely AI. It was true, I hadn’t written it; it was probably generated by AI and put on Wikipedia.

I have been really against these tools until now. The reason for that was that I was very concerned people were mistakenly going to be accused of using AI to write their papers when in reality they wrote them.

If these tools can accurately distinguish AI content from human content, that could be a really great thing. Maybe.

If you keep in mind that the average human is about as smart as the smartest bear, then it becomes easy to see that if we can just have someone else write our paper for us, why wouldn’t we do it? This is not a human failing. This is human adaptation at its best. We are so good at figuring out ways to save calories, eat more, and do less. It’s what has gotten us this far.

But we all know sometimes we need to exercise, work hard, and do difficult things because doing so helps us reach the next level. And then at that level, we can save calories, eat more, and do less, but with fancier food, nicer cars, and a bigger house. It’s just the way of being a human.

I don’t see much use in getting good at writing anymore. It’s going to be just as useful as being able to memorize the Iliad or the Odyssey. It’s a neat parlor trick, but it’s not what makes us human. What makes us human is synthesizing, adapting, being creative, building things, innovating. These are really wonderful human traits. AI is a shortcut to learning faster. I believe that is the message. When we can learn faster, we can do the other human things sooner and better.

Personally, I enjoy writing, but it’s not overly useful. In my day-to-day job, the most useful thing I’ve found is figuring out how to get AI to do my work faster, better, and cheaper. That’s a valuable skill today. Not trying to figure out how to craft a well-written sentence.

I would recommend that teachers investigate this Pangram tool. But I wouldn’t fail students who are found to use AI in their writing. I would simply make the student rewrite the material. And if they can figure out how to get AI to write content that isn’t just plagiarized by another human and tricks this tool, then they’ve learned something I haven’t been able to figure out. That would be a truly smart human. I love to see a class where a teacher tries to get their students to trick Pangram.

And if it’s so critically important that a student write their content themselves, then make them come in and write it on a locked-down browser in a classroom setting. This whole thing could so easily be solved, except for the fact that the average human is no smarter than the smartest bear. So administrators and teachers will wring their hands and be upset and fail students because they can’t figure out that they just need the student to write, or even better, speak while another person is looking at them.

Don’t be upset that students are having AI write their papers. If you want to be upset about something, look at the shitty dialed-in world we live in. Maybe you’ll understand why a student doesn’t have any interest in actually working hard, because that’s not what it’s about. For God’s sake, look at the people running this world and what pieces of shit they are. Help your students navigate this world and stop judging them. Use your big brains in academia and have a modicum of curiosity and empathy for someone and something outside your tiny little intellectual world. You REALLY are terrible at that.

Here are the Pangram results for this article. It’s 93.5% human-written. 6.5% of the document is AI-generated, which is accurate. I had AI give me the list of those free learning sites.