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<\/p>\nI used to think that the hype surrounding artificial intelligence was just that \u2013 hype. I was sceptical when ChatGPT made its debut. The media frenzy, the breathless proclamations of a new era \u2013 it all felt familiar. I assumed it would blow over like every tech fad before it. I was wrong. But not in the way you might think.<\/p>\n
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The panic came first. Faculty meetings erupted in dread: \u201cHow will we detect plagiarism now?<\/em>\u201d \u201cIs this the end of the college essay?<\/em>\u201d \u201cShould we go back to blue books and proctored exams?<\/em>\u201d My business school colleagues suddenly behaved as if cheating had just been invented.<\/p>\n Then, almost overnight, the hand-wringing turned into hand-rubbing. The same professors forecasting academic doom were now giddily rebranding themselves as \u201cAI-ready educators<\/em>.\u201d Across campus, workshops like Building AI Skills and Knowledge in the Classroom<\/em> and AI Literacy Essentials<\/em> popped up like mushrooms after rain. The initial panic about plagiarism gave way to a resigned embrace: \u201cIf you can\u2019t beat \u2018em, join \u2018em<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n This about-face wasn\u2019t unique to my campus. The California State University (CSU) system \u2013 America\u2019s largest public university system with 23 campuses and nearly half a million students \u2013 went all-in, announcing a $17 million partnership with OpenAI. CSU would become the nation\u2019s first \u201cAI-empowered<\/em>\u201d university system, offering free ChatGPT Edu (a campus-branded version designed for educational institutions) to every student and employee. The press release gushed about \u201cpersonalized, future-focused learning tools<\/em>\u201d and preparing students for an \u201cAI-driven economy<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The timing was surreal. CSU unveiled its grand technological gesture just as it proposed slashing $375 million from its budget. While administrators cut ribbons on their AI initiative, they were also cutting faculty positions, entire academic programs, and student services. At CSU East Bay, general layoff notices were issued twice within a year, hitting departments like General Studies and Modern Languages. My own alma mater, Sonoma State, faced a $24 million deficit and announced plans to eliminate 23 academic programs \u2013 including philosophy, economics, and physics \u2013 and to cut over 130 faculty positions, more than a quarter of its teaching staff.<\/p>\n At San Francisco State University, the provost\u2019s office formally notified our union, the California Faculty Association (CFA) of potential layoffs \u2013 an announcement that sent shockwaves through campus as faculty tried to reconcile budget cuts with the administration\u2019s AI enthusiasm. The irony was hard to miss: the same month our union received layoff threats, OpenAI\u2019s education evangelists set up shop in the university library to recruit faculty into the dark gospel of automated learning.<\/p>\n The math is brutal and the juxtaposition stark: millions for OpenAI while pink slips go out to longtime lecturers. The CSU isn\u2019t investing in education \u2013 it\u2019s outsourcing it, paying premium prices for a chatbot many students were already using for free.<\/p>\n For Sale: Critical Education<\/strong><\/p>\n Public education has been for sale for decades. Cultural theorist Henry Giroux was among the first to see how public universities were being remade as vocational feeders for private markets. Academic departments now have to justify themselves in the language of revenue, \u201cdeliverables<\/em>,\u201d and \u201clearning outcomes<\/em>.\u201d CSU\u2019s new partnership with OpenAI is the latest turn of that screw.<\/p>\n Others have traced the same drift. Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades called it academic capitalism<\/em>:<\/a> knowledge refashioned as commodity and students as consumers. In Unmaking the Public University, <\/em>Christopher Newfield showed how privatization actually impoverishes public universities, turning them into debt-financed shells of themselves. Benjamin Ginsberg chronicled the rise of the \u201call-administrative campus<\/em>,\u201d where managerial layers and administrative blight multiplied even as faculty shrink. And Martha Nussbaum warned what\u2019s lost when the humanities \u2013 those spaces for imagination and civic reflection \u2013 are treated as expendable in a democracy. Together they describe a university that no longer asks what education is for<\/em>, only what it can earn.<\/em><\/p>\n The California State University system has now written the next chapter of that story. Facing deficits and enrolment declines, administrators embraced the rhetoric of AI-innovation as if it were salvation. When CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia announced the $17-million partnership with OpenAI, the press release<\/a> promised a \u201chighly collaborative public-private initiative<\/em>\u201d that would \u201celevate our students\u2019 educational experience<\/em>\u201d and \u201cdrive California\u2019s AI-powered economy<\/em>.\u201d This corporate-speak reads like a press release ChatGPT could have written.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, at San Francisco State, entire graduate programs devoted to critical inquiry \u2013 Women and Gender Studies, and Anthropology \u2013 were being suspended due to lack of funding. But not to worry: everyone got a free ChatGPT Edu license!<\/p>\n Professor Martha Kenney, Chair of the Women and Gender Studies department and Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation grant examining AI\u2019s social justice impacts, saw the contradiction firsthand. Shortly after the CSU announcement, she co-authored a San Francisco Chronicle<\/em> op-ed <\/a>with Anthropology Professor Martha Lincoln, warning that the new initiative risked short-changing students and undermining critical thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not a Luddite<\/em>,\u201d Kenney wrote. \u201cBut we need to be asking critical questions about what AI is doing to education, labour, and democracy \u2013 questions that my department is uniquely qualified to explore<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The irony couldn\u2019t be starker: the very programs best equipped to study the social and ethical implications of AI were being defunded, even as the university promoted the use of OpenAI\u2019s products across campus.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t innovation \u2013 it\u2019s institutional auto-cannibalism.<\/p>\n The new mission statement? Optimization. Inside the institution, the corporate idiom trickles down through administrative memos and patronizing emails. Under the guise of \u201cfiscal sustainability<\/em>\u201d (a friendlier way of saying \u201ccuts<\/em>\u201d), administrators sharpen their scalpels to restructure the university in accordance with efficiency metrics instead of educational purpose.<\/p>\n The messaging from administrators would be comical if it weren\u2019t so cynical. Before summer break at San Francisco State, a university administrator warned faculty in an email of potential layoffs, hedging with the lines: \u201cWe hope to avoid layoffs<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cNo decisions have been made<\/em>.\u201d Weeks later came her chirpy summer send-off: \u201cI hope you are enjoying the last day to turn in grades. You may even be reading the novel you never finished from winter break<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Right, because nothing says leisure reading like looming unemployment. Then came the kicker: \u201cIf we continue doing the work above to reduce expenses while still maintaining access for students, we do not anticipate having to do layoffs<\/em>.\u201d Translation: Sacrifice your workloads, your job security, even your colleagues, maybe we\u2019ll let you keep your job. No promises. Now go enjoy that novel.<\/p>\n Technopoly Comes to Campus<\/strong><\/p>\n When my business school colleagues insist that ChatGPT is \u201cjust another tool in the toolbox<\/em>,\u201d I\u2019m tempted to remind them that Facebook was once \u201cjust a way to connect with friends<\/em>.\u201d But there\u2019s a difference between tools and technologies. Tools help us accomplish tasks; technologies reshape the very environments in which we think, work, and relate. As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don\u2019t merely use<\/em> technologies; we participate<\/em> in them. With tools, we retain agency \u2013 we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; virtual communication networks changed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth.<\/p>\n Media theorist Neil Postman warned that a \u201ctechnopoly<\/em>\u201d arises when societies surrender judgment to technological imperatives \u2013 when efficiency and innovation become moral goods in themselves. Once metrics like speed and optimization replace reflection and dialogue, education mutates into logistics: grading automated, essays generated in seconds. Knowledge becomes data; teaching becomes delivery. What disappears are precious human capacities \u2013 curiosity, discernment, presence. The result isn\u2019t augmented intelligence but simulated learning: a paint-by-numbers approach to thought.<\/p>\n Political theorist Langdon Winner once asked whether artifacts can have politics.<\/a> They can, and AI systems are no exception. They encode assumptions about what counts as intelligence and whose labour counts as valuable. The more we rely on algorithms, the more we normalize their values: automation, prediction, standardization, and corporate dependency. Eventually these priorities fade from view and come to seem natural \u2013 \u201cjust the way the situation is<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n In classrooms today, the technopoly is thriving. Universities are being retrofitted as fulfilment centres of cognitive convenience. Students aren\u2019t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively. We are exporting the very labour of teaching and learning \u2013 the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one\u2019s own voice. Critical pedagogy is out; productivity hacks are in. What\u2019s sold as innovation is really surrender. As the university trades its teaching mission for \u201cAI-tech integration<\/em>,\u201d it doesn\u2019t just risk irrelevance \u2013 it risks becoming mechanically soulless. Genuine intellectual struggle has become too expensive of a value proposition.<\/p>\n The scandal is not one of ignorance but indifference. University administrators understand exactly what\u2019s going on, and proceed anyway. As long as enrolment numbers hold and tuition checks clear, they turn a blind eye to the learning crisis while faculty are left to manage the educational carnage in their classrooms.<\/p>\n The future of education has already arrived, as a liquidation sale of everything that once made it matter.<\/p>\n The Cheating-AI Technology Complex<\/strong><\/p>\n Before AI arrived, I used to joke with colleagues about plagiarism. \u201cToo bad there isn\u2019t an <\/em>AI app that can grade <\/em><\/a>their plagiarized essays for us<\/em>,\u201d I\u2019d say, half in jest. Students have always found ways to cheat \u2013 scribbling answers on their palms, sending exams to Chegg.com<\/em>,<\/a> hiring ghostwriters \u2013 but ChatGPT took it to another level. Suddenly they had access to a writing assistant that never slept, never charged, and never said no.<\/p>\n Universities scrambled to fight back with AI-detectors like Turnitin \u2013 despite high rates of false positives<\/a>, documented bias against ESL<\/a> and Black students<\/a> situation, and the absurdity of fighting robots with robots. It\u2019s a twisted ouroboros: universities partner with AI companies; students use AI to cheat; schools panic about cheating and then partner with more AI companies to detect the cheating. It\u2019s surveillance capitalism meeting institutional malpractice, with students trapped in an arms race they never asked to join.<\/p>\n The ouroboros just got darker. In October 2025, Perplexity AI launched a Facebook Ad<\/a> for its new Comet<\/em> browser featuring a teenage influencer bragging about how he\u2019ll use the app to cheat on every quiz and assignment \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t parody. The company literally paid to broadcast academic dishonesty as a selling point. Marc Watkins, writing on his Substack<\/em><\/a>, called it \u201ca new low<\/em>,\u201d noting that Perplexity\u2019s own CEO seemed unaware his marketing team was glamorizing fraud.<\/p>\n If this sounds like satire, it isn\u2019t: the same week that ad dropped, a faculty member in our College of Business emailed all professors and students, enthusiastically promoting a free one-year Perplexity Pro account \u201cwith some additional interesting features!<\/em>\u201d Yes \u2013 even more effective ways to cheat. It\u2019s hard to script a clearer emblem of what I\u2019ve called education\u2019s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing.<\/p>\n Then there is the Chungin \u201cRoy\u201d Lee saga. Lee arrived as a freshman at Columbia University with ambition \u2013 and an OpenAI tab permanently open. By his own admission, he cheated on nearly every assignment. \u201cI\u2019d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out<\/em>,\u201d he told New York Magazine<\/em><\/a>. \u201cAI wrote 80 percent of every essay I turned in<\/em>.\u201d Asked why he even bothered applying to an Ivy League school, Lee was disarmingly honest: \u201cTo find a wife and a startup partner<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n It would be hilarious if it weren\u2019t so telling. Conservative economist Tyler Cowen has offered an even bleaker take on the modern university\u2019s \u201cvalue proposition<\/em>.\u201d \u201cHigher education will persist as a dating service, a way of leaving the house, and a chance to party and go see some football games<\/em>,\u201d he wrote in Everyone\u2019s Using AI to Cheat at School. And That\u2019s a Good Thing<\/em>.<\/a> In this view, the university\u2019s intellectual mission is already dead, replaced by credentialism, consumption, and convenience.<\/p>\n Lee\u2019s first venture was an AI app called Interview Coder, designed to cheat Amazon\u2019s job interviews. He filmed himself using it<\/a>; his video post went viral. Columbia suspended him for \u201cadvertising a link to a cheating tool<\/em><\/a>.\u201d Ironically, this came just as the university \u2013 like the CSU \u2013 announced a partnership with OpenAI, the same company powering the software that Lee used to cheat his way through their courses.<\/p>\n Unfazed, Lee posted his disciplinary hearing online, gaining more followers. He and his business partner Neel Shanmugam, also disciplined, argued their app violated no rules. \u201cI didn’t learn anything in any class at Columbia<\/em>,\u201d Shanmugam told KTVU News<\/em><\/a>. \u201cAnd I think that applies to most of my friends<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n After their suspension, the dynamic duo dropped out, raised $5.3 million in seed funding, and relocated to San Francisco. Of course \u2013 because nothing says \u201ctech visionary\u201d like getting expelled for cheating.<\/p>\n Their new company? Cluely.<\/a> Its mission: \u201cWe want to cheat on everything. To help you cheat \u2013 smarter<\/em>.\u201d Its tagline: \u201cWe built Cluely so you never have to think alone again<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Cluely isn\u2019t hiding its purpose; it\u2019s flaunting it. Its manifesto<\/a> spells out the logic:<\/p>\n \u201cWhy memorize facts, write code, research anything \u2013 when a model can do it in seconds? The future won\u2019t reward effort. It\u2019ll reward leverage. So start cheating. Because when everyone does, no one is.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n When challenged on ethics, Lee resorts to the standard Silicon Valley defence: \u201cany technology in the past \u2013 whether that\u2019s calculators, Google search \u2013 they were all met with an initial push back of, \u2018hey, this is cheating\u2019.<\/em>\u201d he told KTVU<\/em>. It\u2019s a glib analogy that sounds profound at a startup pitch but crumbles under scrutiny. Calculators expanded reasoning; the printing press spread knowledge. ChatGPT, by contrast, doesn\u2019t extend cognition \u2013 it automates it, turning thinking itself into a service. Rather than democratizing learning, it privatizes the act of thinking under corporate control.<\/p>\n When a 21-year-old college dropout suspended for cheating lectures us about technological inevitability, the response shouldn\u2019t be moral panic but moral clarity \u2013 about whose interests are being served. Cheating has ceased to be a subculture; it\u2019s become a brand identity and venture-capital ideology. And why not? In the Chatversity, cheating is no longer deviant \u2013 it\u2019s the default. Students openly swap jailbreak prompts to make ChatGPT sound dumber, insert typos<\/a>, and train models on their own mediocre essays to \u201chumanize<\/em>\u201d the output.<\/p>\n What\u2019s unfolding now is more than dishonesty \u2013 it\u2019s the unravelling of any shared understanding of what education is for. And students aren\u2019t irrational. Many are under immense pressure to maintain GPAs for scholarships, financial aid, or visa eligibility. Education has become transactional; cheating has become a survival strategy.<\/p>\n Some institutions have simply given up. Ohio State University announced that using AI would no longer count as an academic integrity violation. \u201cAll cases of using AI in classes will not be an academic integrity question going forward<\/em>,\u201d Provost Ravi Bellamkonda told<\/a> WOSU<\/em> public radio. In an op-ed, OSU alum Christian Collins asked the obvious question: \u201cWhy would a student pay full tuition, along with exposing themselves to the economically ruinous trap of<\/em> student debt<\/em><\/a>, to potentially not even be taught by a human being?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n The irony only deepens.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/ai2-e1771014266410.jpg\")
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