How Video Game Exploits Predicted ChatGPT College Cheating

There is currently a somewhat horrifying article going around from NY Magazine about how widespread cheating is in college, no longer through sneaking in answers to tests or having someone else write your essay. Well, there is someone else writing your essay, or rather, some thing.

That would be ChatGPT, the ubiquitous AI system that can take any prompt and spit out a convincing-sounding paper. This has spread everywhere from high school to the Ivy League, and teachers are drowning in AI-generated papers where it’s often impossible to prove their authenticity, so many are just giving up. Here’s a sampling from the piece of the thought process of the students doing:

“I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

The thing is, video games have predicted this exact same concept for years. One that’s more demonstrable in the industry than other comparable examples of societal laziness. Rather, ChatGPT is more akin to an exploit, to an overpowered build in a game.

In the dozens and dozens of games I’ve played over the years, there is one universal truth. If there is a shortcut to beating a game or doing an insane amount of damage or anything that’s able to be utilized for an easy path through a game’s challenges, it will be used. By bad players, by good players, if it exists, it’s a tool that will be exploited until developers take note and nerf its power or remove it from the game entirely, patching the game, fixing a bug.

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Players will chose this path almost every time. Those who don’t use it may be in it for “the love of the game,” but this requires purposeful handicapping to create some semblance of a challenge. But the overpowered build or skill or skip is so tempting that it is often impossible to resist for the vast majority of players.

This is ChatGPT, a bug, an exploit in the education system that students will now have to purposefully avoid using in order to have some semblance of challenge and friction in their education. Many students, having been pressured their entire life to get good grades and study and research for difficult tests and lengthy papers now suddenly have a button to skip all that. Quite literally, a button. And when you’re 14-22, you’re not exactly thinking about the long-term benefits of actually getting an education instead of coasting your way to whatever degree you’re seeking. If you think that this cannot be true for more hyper-specialized fields like law or medicine, I have bad news about what many lawyers are now using to write legal opinions and doctors are relying on to come up with diagnoses.

The problem here is…there is no patch. No fixing this bug. Students don’t want it fixed, OpenAI and other tech giants throwing billions into AI tech don’t want it fixed, and at this point there is no actual means of stopping this. Any possible legislation is seemingly ages away, as if Congress ever does a coherent job of policing big tech in the first place. The tools to find AI-generated content are not remotely on par with the ability to generate the AI content, which is getting more complex and harder to spot by the day. The teachers and professors here are being thrust into an impossible situation. They’re sometimes even going back to the stone age of oral reports and pencil-written essays, with little other choice.

The video game industry has this handled. There will always be bugs, exploits, cheats or simply overpowered options to reduce the challenge in any game. But it’s whack-a-mole. A problem exists for a while, it’s found and fixed, another one crops up later. ChatGPT is not a mole. ChatGPT is a Balrog emerging from a pit with no Gandalf to stand in its way. Appealing to the moral nature of good sportsmanship and ethics will not work here on the vast majority of students. They want to have fun in college, they want to graduate with the degree they’re paying potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for, and they do not want any of that at risk because of pesky classwork or difficult tests. And there is no end in sight for this. No patch is coming.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.