Over Hill and Under Hill

Won't get fooled again

I went for a walk on Monday. It was a Bank Holiday, and a sunny day, so I decided to do the final leg of the Cotswold Way from Chipping Sodbury to Bath, and it was lovely. The path winds its way along, rising and falling with the line of the hills, mostly keeping clear of busy roads, with beautiful views as far as into Wales. It takes you through James Dyson’s estate, past Dyrham Park, and across the Civil War Lansdown battlefield. The final stretch leads you through historic Bath, past the Royal Crescent, through the Circus and finishing up with hordes of tourists by the Abbey.

Wild garlic in the woods

I was under my own steam, but the path was well signposted, and I’d loaded a GPS map of the route into Google Maps. After about 7 hours and just over 20 miles of walking, I was tired but satisfied, and even had time to grab a well-earned pint by the station.

Nobody made me do it. Nobody was keeping track of me with chip timing and checkpoints, making sure I didn’t cut corners or grab an Uber for some of the way. But I went ahead and walked the whole route anyway, right to the end. This isn’t to assert some kind of moral superiority, because I very much enjoyed

Rachel Hewitt

’s piece about the fact that You Can Just Stop (even if I’m nowhere near her league in terms of distance and speed!). But my point is that it’s some kind of metaphor for what a university degree can and should be like.

I expect you’ve read the recent Intelligencer article about how “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”, about the apparently ubiquitous use of AI tools in education now. And, even as an educator, I’m afraid that my feeling is somewhat of a shrug. I mean, sure, you can do that.

I could have cheated on this piece. I just asked Grok to “Write a piece in the style of bristoliver's Logging the World Substack about people cheating in education using AI. Use bristoliver's style, and write it in the way he would”:

Despite the prompts, it’s … not good. It’s not how I write: I’m British, so I don’t even really know what a sophomore is. But I flatter myself that my prose style is better, my extended Malcolm at the beginning feels like a less generic and more human way into the topic. As the Intelligencer piece says:

Most of the writing professors I spoke to told me that it’s abundantly clear when their students use AI. Sometimes there’s a smoothness to the language, a flattened syntax; other times, it’s clumsy and mechanical.

To be honest, as someone who reads a lot of texts which could potentially have been AI-generated, it’s not that hard to tell at the moment. You don’t have to be Rick Deckard to spot the hallucinated references and the constant desire to “delve”. But let us assume it won’t stay that way forever, given the exponential rate of progress in the field.

It’s not hard to suppose that in 2028 or so, every college student will have access to free software which can spit out an A-grade essay which is indistinguishable from one written by its human counterpart. Even if you don’t believe it’s possible, we should think about what that would mean. Would it be the end of the university? I don’t think so.

The reason that my pint on Monday was satisfying was a feeling that I’d earned it. I could have done the whole route by bus and arrived hours earlier, but it wouldn’t have come with the same sense of pride. It wasn’t the end point that mattered, but the journey - the kestrel and the pheasant I saw, the fact that I learned who Bevil Grenville was, the grin on my face from walking through fields of baby lambs in the sun, the thoughts I had along the way.

In the same way, the point of university is not to produce essays or to solve problem sheets. It’s to learn how to think. Most of the students graduating from our School in a couple of months won’t directly apply Lagrange’s Theorem ever again, but that doesn’t mean they wasted their time learning about it. The skills of understanding a logical proof, seeing how all the pieces fit together as part of a wider theory, and being able to put together rigorous arguments of their own are universal, and why employers are very happy to take on maths graduates.

So even in a world of ubiquitous AI, I think there will still be value to being able to rise to the challenge to do these things by yourself. Even if a computer can do something as well or better, there’ll still be a deep satisfaction in achieving it by yourself. People are still keen to learn the piano despite the fact that perfect recordings of every single piece are available pretty much for free, and they know that they’ll never be Horowitz.

At the end of the day, I suspect that we’ll come to see AI as a tool like anything else. I feel like there wasn’t any particular vice in me not packing a paper map, and being able to check that I hadn’t wandered off track by using the GPS on my phone. Some purists may disagree, and I can imagine arguments in the future about which aspects of AI use, short of “write me a whole essay”, will be regarded as unfair or as just part of technology-enhanced learning.

But for the people who do continue to learn by themselves, who don’t succumb completely to the AI tools, it might feel unfair that some of the end points might look very much the same. If someone puts in the effort and gets the same grade as someone who typed in a prompt, doesn’t that devalue the grade? Well, perhaps, unless you believe in old-fashioned ideas like hard work being its own reward.

I don’t really have a better answer for how to lead your life than the words of the great Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential:

Be prepared to witness every variety of human folly and injustice without it screwing up your head or poisoning your attitude. You will simply have to endure the contradictions and inequities of this life. 'Why does that brain-damaged, lazy-assed busboy take home more money than me, the goddamn sous-chef?' should not be a question that drives you to tears of rage and frustration. It will just be like that sometimes. Accept it.

Maybe that’s not really an answer, but it’s part of one at least. In the meantime, have a good week, and why not explore some new footpaths you’ve never been on before?