🆕 Never Post! Is It Even Possible To Ban A.I. In The Classroom?

Pals! What luck! A new Never Post for you this Friday! In this episode: Tori Dominguez-Peek returns to look at the prevalence of AI in the college classroom, and what it takes to ban it. Also: BOP SPOTTER!

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Intro Links

• Vote for us in the Signal Awards!
  
• Google to reinstate banned YouTube accounts censored for political speech
• Alex Jones sports Hitler mustache in shocking broadcast: 'It had a wild effect on women'
• U.S. Secret Service disrupts telecom network that threatened NYC during U.N. General Assembly
• TProphet on bsky
• The Irresistible Rise of On Tyranny
• Here’s what’s happening right now with the US TikTok deal
• Inside Trump's deal to save TikTok
• Paramount Skydance eyes takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery as high as $24 a share: report
• LimeWire acquires Fyre Festival, has vague plans to offer 'real experiences'
• LimeWire, Former File-Sharing Service, Is Revealed as Buyer of Fyre Festival
  
• Bop Spotter

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Teaching AI

• Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
• The Impact of Gen AI on Critical Thinking (Microsoft)
• AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

Find Everyone:

• Megan Fritts on X
• Dr. Rui Sousa-Silva on LinkedIn
• Tori Dominguez Peek on Bluesky
• Press Start Pod on Bluesky

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

And then this warning flashes on the light
Meter: Inside the house a pilot light
Is always burning in the oven’s eyes,
and the low roof is pulled down over the eyes
Like a hat, and underneath the morning’s leit-
Motif networks of subterranean lines

Run like the nervous system, or bloodlines
Or fractures spreading from tectonic lines
of fault. From distant coasts, heavy and light
Petreoleum is piped across state lines,
and gas, electric, oil, and water lines 
Convey their vital humours to the house.

Excerpt of Nervous Systems, by Greg Williamson

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 09/23/2025 at 11:56AM eastern, and we have a slightly late show for you this week. Sorry about that. I got a toddler cold, and we're in the middle of renegotiating AI Mike's contract, but we're here.

We made it. We did it. In our third ever show length segment, contributing producer Tori Dominguez Peak returns to look at artificial intelligence in the classroom, including one instructor who has said no more and has banned its use entirely. Tori tells Jason what that entails and tackles the old Kennard is writing, thinking, and also bop spotter. But right now, we're gonna take a quick break.

You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Hello? Is it five stories for you this week you're looking for? YouTube is reinstating the channels of creators previously suspended for violating COVID nineteen and election disinformation guidelines an alphabet lawyer says are no longer in force.

This according to a document obtained by Fox News and prepared for the US house judiciary committee. Reflecting on the company's commitment to free expression, Daniel f Donovan, counsel for alphabet rights, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID nineteen and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect. YouTube takes seriously the importance of protecting free expression, the document states elsewhere, and access to a range of viewpoints. The document also explicitly points out that YouTube has not, does not, and will not employ any kind of fact checking or labeling mechanism in its software. At time of writing, no list of the channels to be potentially reinstated has been published, but I bet it's not that hard to figure out who might be on it.

In completely unrelated news, Alex Jones recently appeared on his show sporting a Hitler mustache about which he said, I could tell you it had a wild effect on women.

Ew.

The US Secret Service shut down a high powered cellular network that they claimed posed a threat to tri state area mobile communications this week. CBS News reports that, quote, law enforcement discovered 300 SIM servers over a 100,000 SIM cards, enabling encrypted anonymous communication and capable of sending 30,000,000 text messages per minute that could have, again, allegedly disabled cell phone towers and launched a distributed denial of service attack with the ability to block emergency communications like EMS and police dispatch, end quote. Secret service claims the operation was well funded and possibly under control of state actors looking to cause trouble for UN week in New York. Independent tech auditors and security analysts are not so convinced. Well funded, yes, but capable of causing such widespread havoc in New York City of all places, not so much.

There is nothing about this infrastructure that would be hugely disruptive or damaging to mobile phone networks, writes t profit, the self described telecom informer for Hacker Magazine 2,600 on Blue Sky. BookTok has managed to shoot Timothy Snyder's lean but weighty 2017 book on tyranny to the top of indie bookshop sales lists over the last few months. On Tyranny's bullet point style format and short chapters, writes Laura Miller for Slate, make it easy to break into nuggets of exhortation. A particular favorite is lesson number one, do not obey in advance, urging individuals and institutions not to appease authoritarian governments before they are even asked to. Some fans on TikTok temporarily turn over their accounts to On Tyranny, reading one chapter aloud per video until they've narrated the whole thing.

Speaking of TikTok, an alleged so called framework deal has been penned regarding the sale of the Chinese owned platform to domestic concerns. The US government and ByteDance have brokered a forthcoming deal whereby Oracle, Silver Lake Technology Management, and Andreessen Horowitz would oversee TikTok's US operations. This group would have an 80% ownership share, and a member of the board would be appointed by the US government. President Trump has also suggested Fox News Baron Rupert Murdoch will likely be involved somehow. The US based owners would lease TikTok's infamous algorithm, which Oracle would oversee and, quote, retrain.

Larry Ellison, CTO and founder of Oracle, has also recently financed a number of large scale media mergers with his son, David Ellison. Paramount Skydance controls CBS, Paramount Pictures, and the streamer Paramount Plus. The Ellisons are also allegedly eyeing a takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns, among other things, CNN. And finally, get ready for a really good sentence. You ready?

Ready for this good sentence? Here we go. Limewire, relaunched as an NFT marketplace, has purchased the rights to the infamous fire festival brand. The New York Times reports that the purchase was made for 245,000 US dollars in an eBay auction. It is unclear what Limewire fire will become.

The music downloader turned NFT peddler is apparently aiming for something that, quote, expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real world experiences, community, and surprise, a thing which no doubt aligns well with the fire festival brand. Ew. In show news this week, if you ordered a t shirt, they are being printed next week. Once the print is done, they will head to Neverpost HQ where they will be packed and shipped one by one by hand with love. We will also have very few stock designs available at the end of that process.

I'm gonna let you know in the show news portion of future episodes when and where you can snag those if you missed out. But when I say very few, I really mean it. We're gonna have, like, fewer than 10 stock shirts. And finally, holy cow, we are a signal podcast award finalist in the technology category. That is fun.

Heck yeah. If you could please go vote for us, we would love that. We'll put a link in the show notes. We are up against some really rad folks, including close all tabs, who you may remember from our hentai segment and kill switch of whom we're just generally fans. But please go vote for us.

We will love you forever. Signal awards, technology category, there's a link in the show notes. Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. In this episode, Tory talks with Jason about AI in the classroom.

But first, BopSpotter is a project by Riley Walls, and it's described this way. Somewhere in the Mission District of San Francisco is a microphone pointed down at the street below. It is using a Shazam manner. So in our interstitials this week, Hans took it upon himself to recreate what he imagined to be the sonic environment at the time of some spotting. So what you are about to hear are not field recordings, but carefully crafted audio collages

Midnight, 12AM. 03:30AM. So I'm sitting here at my desk today, watching the leaves slowly change color when an email comes in, From friend of the show, Tori Dominguez Peek, who submitted to us a year ago a piece you might remember, wherein AI chatbot companies reached out to her with the proposition of turning her deceased mother into an AI chatbot. Well, Tori is back with another piece. I asked, what's it about?

No one would let me know. Tori wanted to tell me herself. So please, welcome back to Neverpost, Tori.

Hey, Jason. Thanks so much for bringing me on.

I'm excited to learn what I'm about to learn.

So today, I have a tale for you about AI on college campuses and Brazilian Portuguese and solving crimes.

All three of my biggest interests. Let's get started.

Story in three acts, the Aspheric life. So Jason, like you said, fall is in full swing.

Absolutely.

I have I have purchased pumpkin spice lattes. The leaves are crunching. Sure. Hans has been cooking beans.

Hans has been cooking beans. I'm up to five or six layers every time I leave the house.

And with fall happening comes a new semester on college campuses everywhere across The US. And so kind of with that comes the renewed conversation that people have been having about AI in education, and is it cheating, and like all of the things. Sure. So earlier this year, the New Yorker ran this piece with the title, everyone is cheating through college. And the whole crux of it was just talking about like how commonplace it is for students to use ChatGPT or to use it to like help with assignments or even going as a part of like, write my term paper for me.

Mhmm.

Blurring the line between getting it to help you and then like, what has become plagiarism. And like, the most stunning part about that article to me that I still think about is they did a very small survey. It was like a thousand college students. But 90% of them had said they had used ChatGPT to help with homework assignments.

And you found this surprising?

Yeah. Mean, just the the number was wild. I knew it would be over 50. When I saw 90, I was like, oh, we're cooked. Okay.

But I just couldn't stop thinking about like, what happens when we are letting a piece of technology kind of do the thinking for us or do the talking for us

Sure.

On that scale. And so I decided to talk to someone.

When I'm working on a new paper, I'll be, you know, typing up some section and realize I don't know how to phrase it. And that tells me, oh, okay, I need to go figure out what I actually think here. Because if I can't write about it, that indicates a lack of understanding there. So I think what we're missing when we stop writing ourselves is the ability to check ourselves for misunderstandings.

So that's a professor I interviewed. She's professor Megan Fritz. She teaches philosophy at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

I find it really interesting here that she's using misunderstandings as a framing. As if like we are interrogating our own brain when we set down to write. Yeah. That feels pretty right to me. Tori, can I ask you a question quickly?

Sure.

Did you cheat in college?

No. I cheated in high school though.

Did you cheat in ways that you think fundamentally changed your understanding or inhibited your understanding of what you were doing? Or did they just help you get a better grade?

Okay. Let me just lay out the one scenario that I cheated and I could help you could help me here.

Mhmm.

So I was failing chemistry. And so one thing I noticed was that kids who took a long time to take the test, it was like third period. And then you had fourth period and then there was lunch. And so I was like, oh, if I just take forever on this test, I can finish it later and study for it during fourth period.

Yeah.

And so I was just like, oh, it's just taking me forever. I have a headache. Like, I guess I have to come back for lunch. And like, come back during lunch and finish up this test. Bell rings, I go to fourth period.

It's like my study hall period. I'm like study I'm like going over the stoichiometry formulas. I'm hitting the books. And then I lunch happens. I go back to the chem room.

I actually reanswered some stuff because I was like, I have it in my brain fresh now.

Beautiful.

And I took it. Is that cheating? It kind of is.

I well, yeah. I mean, by the letter of the law, but it's gamesmanship is what I think it is. Like, you still

the player.

Like Yeah. You still walked in there with the requisite knowledge or the understanding of how to find the knowledge, and you applied your brain to the problems at hand and Yeah. Got a better grade to them. Under the framework that professor Fritz is setting out here, that seems to be a different kind of malfeasance in the classroom. And one that I perhaps look more fondly on.

I cheated constantly.

Okay.

Either buy more time because I had not prepared myself sufficiently on time, or route myself around rote memorization which I considered to be an impediment to learning and not a benchmark by which you measured learning. And honestly, resented having to regurgitate things that one could find in a book onto a page later. So I count neither of those things as cheating. But like the thinking that I had to do with that information still happened in my head and hit the page.

That's the thing. Like, I was still studying.

Yeah.

I just convinced my chem teacher that I had a headache when I didn't. Perfect. Right? Yeah. But I was not plugging formulas in the chattypety and being like, what are the answers to these questions?

Which I think is kind of different.

Sure.

And professor Fritz wrote this article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I will read you out loud an excerpt because I think it says something like really poignant. It says, we're not simply frustrated by just trying to police AI use or the labor of having to write up students for academic dishonesty or the way that reading student work has become a rather nihilistic task. Our frustration is not merely that we don't care what AI has to say and therefore get bored grading papers. It is that we actively miss reading the thoughts of our human students.

That is so dispiriting. Wow. Famously easy job gets easier.

It's kind of a bummer. And she is like hitting something here. Like, when you write down something on a page, you are transmuting your thoughts onto a page. And when you turn it in, your instructor is reading your thoughts. Like, we know there is a relationship between writing and thinking.

Right. Exactly. And I like that she's extending it to like a relationship between people on either side of that activity. You will have a relationship with your thoughts to the writing and the people reading your writing have a relationship to those thoughts and therefore you. And I think that is probably one of the great joys of teaching is to be in relationship with those people via their thoughts.

Yeah. And I I kind of got to this sort of thing like writing and thinking and like how they're related. And I asked her, hey, is writing basically the same thing as thinking or are they kind of intertwined in some way? And she was like, yeah, they definitely are related. And that we write it to document our thoughts, but we also write to come up with thoughts.

It's kind of this really unique like both and relationship.

Yeah. You definitely you write to find when you have to stop writing because you don't know what's there, and then you have to go think about it.

Yeah. I mean, whenever I write a script for Neverpost, I will write like a paragraph and then walk away, and then come back like two days later. And then, you know, it's just it's a slow process. But it's because I'm in relation with my brain and trying to figure it out. And then I'm also doing something that is also very thinking heavy, which is I'm learning a second language.

I spoke more Spanish as a kid growing up in a Latin American household. And then I lost it as it became a teenager. And then I'm trying to get back into it as an adult. Mhmm. And so like, when I speak Spanish in my adult learner's Spanish class, I'm like having a thought in English and then translating it in my head and then saying it out loud to them in Spanish, right, to my instructor.

Sure. And then she says something back to me in Spanish, and then I'm trying to translate it into English in my head. And it's just this very like mechanical relationship, and it's not easy. And I feel a little bit like a baby alerting to speak for the first time.

Yeah. Okay. So if I'm if I'm hearing this right then, it's like you're sort of seeing the the the gap between the thought that you're having and your ability to articulate it in this seconds now. I guess, re seconds, third, second, again, language. Probably especially because at one point, it was not there.

And you're feeling this, like, this break in the chain between you having a thought and being able to articulate that. Yeah. And that feels sort of similar to what you think is happening with the insertion of these AI tools into the way people are writing these days.

Yeah. And professor Fritz kind of brought this up that AI is kind of this middleman between thought and language that's never been there before.

The difference between being a native speaker of a language and being someone who's learned a language, I think is is the perfect example of what we are risking, when we use generative AI for our writing and, speaking, that we risk going from this kind of native speaker status to a a a situation where we have to if we want to have these skills at all, we have to reteach it to ourselves in a in a really artificial way.

So is the concern there almost like what happens in its absence? Or like it's like what happens if you're without your Spanish English dictionary as it were Yeah. That you'd actually don't have control over the language.

Yeah. It it feels like if we outsource for example, you didn't do the reading for your college class, but you have to write paper about it and you're just like, shitty, this paper about this thing. You didn't engage with the text. Yeah. You didn't transmit the text into writing.

And so like, you're probably not even remember what that class was about. Yeah. You're losing some type of critical like brain step that helps you metabolize information. Does that make sense? Like, I think writing helps you metabolize information.

And like, if I could just be candid, I think writing is kind of mentally painful for me.

Oh, yeah. That's the whole thing about writing.

Like It

hurts and it's bad.

It hurts and it's bad, and that's the whole point. And I will write something and I'll walk away and I come I will come back three days later, And I'm just like, oh, this psychologically hurts. But then you get into a groove and then it feels good and you've kind of metabolized your thoughts and it comes out and it feels great. And there's just such an emotional experience in that. And so when you're just like, hey chat, GBT, write this podcast episode, summarize the notes from this interview I have with the source, or write the interview questions.

Yeah.

You're kind of losing some threads.

Yeah. You know, not to be the person who's constantly defending cheating here. But when you brought up writing the report in the book you have not read, that is something I believe a It's lot of us have a classic move. You have to try it at some point. And when you do that, you marshal enough information about the book, you skim it, you look up some notes, you try to find as much as you can to walk in there.

But the thing you're doing when you walk in there is like using your brain. It is learning. It is performing. It is something that requires you to undergo a process that will help you be a better thinker and communicator in the future because you are actually doing a task. And to me, what feels scary about this is that it is removing the mental load of doing the task.

Mhmm. Not so much cheating like the information, which is like the veneer around which we all do the process of learning, but it's removing the actual mental task, which is the point of sitting down and being a part of a university or a class or whatever the case may be. So I feel like this has to feel different for teachers. Like, they've walked into campuses every fall for millennia and been like, alright, everyone's cheating. How do I make sure that I know that they are smart enough to continue down the road after they continue cheating?

Like, I I that's probably unlikely that people believe they have a complete fail proof method to stop all cheating forever. Do you think that professor Fritz or other professors are feeling like this is a different kind of stop cheating move they need to make?

Yeah. So professor Fritz has kind of gone nuclear. Okay. She instated a policy in her classroom that is just like, I am banning all AI from my classroom. Okay.

It includes ChatGPT. It even includes like Grammarly, which I use Grammarly to like make sure that my emails aren't misspelled or whatever.

Oh, interesting. Not even

too many exclamation points. She's like, nope, not even that. Because Grammarly can suggest rewrites.

Yeah.

And that in itself is kind of generative AI.

Yeah.

And so I asked her like, okay, so how are you enforcing this?

Sure.

It just seems like a lot of work to enforce this. And she has a very interesting way of going about this. So at some point earlier in the semester, she has them write these short essay type assignments in class. They are handwritten, and they turn it into her right there, hard copy. And so it's zero chance of AI use.

She had you write with a pen and paper. Yeah. And she keeps these essays as kind of evidence of like, this is how these people write. Oh. This is what your voice, your narrative voice is like.

And so then later on in the semester, you turn in something electronically and it's got AI written stuff, she's gonna be like, this doesn't sound like you.

Okay. Does she do the comparison process herself or does she let AI do the comparisons?

So she kinda does both. Interesting. She does use eight different AI detection programs that she runs it through, which is Wow. It's a lot.

Does the school pay for these?

I don't know. That's great question. Don't seem cheap, do they?

No. I would imagine not.

And so that she runs it through all of those. She also just looks at it herself and is like, yeah, I could tell.

Yeah. Of course. Right? Like, teachers have been seeing this, like, forever.

But I did ask, like, can you just tell off the bat of a student's writing as AI generated just by looking at their paper? And she said, yes. And that there's usually a couple of clues.

Okay. Is this where you're coming from my Em dashes? Yeah. Alright. I'll listen to it at least.

The first clue is she calls them 50¢ words. Weird, like formal words that the typical 18 year old undergrad would just not be using. Okay.

An example of that is like the word want, w o n t, where so you might use it in a sentence like, I want to take a walk in the morning. So it's like talking like an inclination. That's a 50¢ word that I I I would say most of my students probably aren't just casually using in their reflection writings.

Now you're coming from my vocabulary. First, my em dashes.

Are you want to use wants?

I mean, of course, I am. But like, where in an academic setting would I ever run across the need to express my feelings through the word want?

Yeah. Exactly. Clue number two, and you were pretty right about this, was Em dashes. Yeah. It's not just any Em dash because I I I feel you, like, it sucks that em dashes have become like this weird red flag and it's like, I like a good em dash.

Sure.

She said that there's a type of em dash that is a red flag to her.

An acquaintance of mine, another philosophy professor, he calls those epiphany dashes, where you go from an ordinary, you know, thought like it's not just a walk em dash, it's a brainstorming session. This is, you know, you're having an epiphany.

Interesting. Yeah. So there's like an emotive component to the Emdash when it's used this way.

Some some sense it sounds like a LinkedIn post. You know what I mean? Like, has that type type of cadence for it.

Right. It's like It's sort of a it's like copywriting usage not Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's super interesting.

And then obviously, the third main clue is like she runs it through one of her software programs and it's like, bing, AI generated. But yeah, mean, it's kind of an intensive process.

Yeah. It sounds exhausting. I guess for everyone, I suppose. Like, are the students having a good time while this is happening?

They don't seem to be big fans.

Sure.

As you can imagine, a lot of them have reacted by saying, well, I don't get why you've banned it because my other professors and other classes don't care. So like, why should it matter?

Oh, jeez. Alright. Well, at least they're still learning something and that something is emotional manipulation.

Yeah. I guess they gotta learn to read the syllabus.

Yeah.

But it does kind of bring up something which is that, okay, some professors don't care. Professor Fritz very much does. Yeah. And so college students are kind of navigating this landscape where it's like in the same semester, they might have someone who's a real stickler about this stuff. And they may also have a different teacher who doesn't care.

And it seems like they have to navigate all these individual AI policies.

Or just not use AI? That's one way to navigate all of them.

Or just not use it at all. But I asked Fritz about this like, oh, do you talk with other professors about handling this? And she said that she actually sits on a couple of AI related committees at her university.

I think instructor uniformity and solidarity on this issue is pretty important for our students. I thought it was a good idea, I was excited to to to try to make this policy. But what ended up happening is that people just had such different views on AI use in higher education that it kind of just turned into debate every every meeting, and we we have not yet made any kind of a policy.

Okay. Well, I suppose that's predictable. It's academia. It's meetings. It's consensus.

That is not necessarily easy to do, but, like, you know, I'm not gonna tip my hand on where I stand on this. I'm sure everyone is in deep mystery here. But like, if it's working for professor Fritz, like, just let her do her thing. It seems like it works.

Yeah. I mean, she thinks that she feels that her system works well for her. Yeah. But her way of doing things relies on knowing what these students write like, and knowing what they don't write like, and they're writing as a sort of fingerprint. But what happens when you can't really tell and you have to do some detective work?

Mhmm.

So I found a detective.

Alright, listeners. This is the most podcast break we will ever do after these messages, a detective.

Even though we learn the same languages from the same books and we learn we can find the same words in the same dictionaries, the way each one of us uses language is different. So we have a let's call it a different style of using language.

So this is doctor Rui Sosasilva. He's from Portugal. His whole training and job is as a forensic linguist. Oh. So like, literally, his field is all about confirming the identity of who wrote what.

Woah. That's a rad job.

I know. It's such a cool job. And I literally didn't even know this job existed until I started writing this episode. And I was like, this is amazing. Wow.

And being able to identify the nuances of what someone sounds like, that identity is called an idiolect.

So ideolect is your own way of speaking or writing the language. So it's as if your DNA was related to the way you use language.

I believe it.

So I mean, like, legally, criminally, historically, a forensic linguist is the person you call to match the fingerprints of someone's writing. Right?

Woah.

And so at the same time, he's also a lecturer. He also teaches, which means that he also has to deal with the issue of students using AI in his class. Really also has students write in his class sit down and write. I know you're not using AI because I can look at you writing. Right?

But when they do that, he's noticing something different than Professor Fritz.

What we see nowadays, people interact with generative AI so much that people are starting to write like machines. With some of my students, I know that they are sitting an exam and I know they were the ones who wrote the text and still when I read the text it sounds as if it was generated by a machine. And that's because we accommodate with other people and we accommodate in the same way with the machines we interact with. So we tend to accommodate so much to the machine that we learn so much from the machine that we start start writing like machines. So this is a challenge at the moment.

So is he saying that because we're ingesting so much writing that has been made in this process that we are starting to regurgitate Yeah. That Yeah. That checks out.

That's wild though, isn't it? Yeah. Because then it makes me think about professor Fritz's class and her methods, like, what if people just start writing like ChatchyPT?

Oh, boy.

Then at some point, it's just gonna get harder to tell.

Alright. You've made an un virtuous cycle here. I see what has happened.

You see what has happened. Yeah. And so because Rui is a forensic linguist, like he is the person you can tell who wrote what, I was like, can you please give me an example of influencing the way of like how machines influence the way people write. And he said that when you speak to ChatGPT in Portuguese, because he lives in Portugal, it will sometimes reply using a Brazilian Portuguese dialect, and that has consequences.

Yeah. One example is the way when when you're writing in English, you usually say, if you want to to list a set of points, you'll say, firstly, such and such. Secondly, such and such. And in Portuguese, usually you wouldn't use the literal pronunciation of the adverb. But people are now doing that and that's because interestingly Brazilian Portuguese does that and because when you look at language variants, I mean in Portugal you've got about 10,000,000 speakers, if you go to Brazil there are 200,000,000, so for generative AI engines they feed on languages.

So they they are more likely to feed on Brazilian Portuguese

than There's just more Brazilian Portuguese language data out And so when Chateapiti speaks Portuguese, it sounds Brazilian.

It's usually Brazilian Portuguese, even though nowadays you can ask to write in European Portuguese but every now and then there is a word in Brazilian Portuguese for example. So the fact that it was based on Brazilian Portuguese and the fact that Brazilian Portuguese uses that literal translation of firstly, secondly, thirdly, now people are writing like that.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Even native speakers of European Portuguese are writing like that at the moment.

Wow. As I'm hearing that, I'm just thinking that that is not necessarily the canary in the coal mine, but there's probably some better metaphor for it just being the visible object of something that is also happening under the layer of language and thinking. If we are regurgitating different cultural grammar rules, we're probably also surfacing other imports that we don't know are imported from different places.

Yeah. I mean, Brazilian adverbs are pretty low stakes. I mean, I think it's kind of amusing. But remember when I said that forensic linguists identify the DNA of language.

Yeah.

And they do that in criminal settings. Can I outline a scary scenario for you, Jason?

I'm braced. I'm ready.

Okay. So doctor Sosasilva told me that one of the things that his colleagues talk about all the time is the use of AI in criminal activity. So like using generative AI to impersonate someone's writing style to write something incriminating.

Sure.

So for example, somebody does not like you. And so they write a strongly worded threat to a politician, but they write it Jason Operholzer style. And they like, maybe they make a sock puppet social media account and they impersonate you, and they post it on there. And you get a visit from the police, and they're like, you wrote this.

Yeah.

How do you prove that you didn't?

That's a good question. I would probably at this point, try to point to like the corpus of available writing that I would have on hand. Like, I'm trying to really take a cynical view of this and just assume that the the infrastructure is weighted against me on this one, and there's now a letter out there signed by me that says, hey, buddy, I'm gonna kill you. And to disprove this, I don't think I would have successful time attacking the language on a word by word basis. I would probably have to compile my own corpus of writing, and I'd probably have to divulge repositories of data that I would otherwise want to keep secret, like private messages and be like, I will take all of my eye messages and put them in a model.

And you can see the way that I communicate and you can see like all the communication I have had, all the cynicism I have had around politicians and the government. And you tell me where in this trajectory is there the leap to a murderer. And it is less about word choice and more about state of mental well-being. Like, is this the and then I'm going to write a politician and murder them trajectory? And here's every piece of written correspondence I have available to you.

And just hope that I've got a doctor like the good Portuguese doctor doctor Sosa Silva on my side who can help me make a better argument about that material than whoever's on the other side.

Yeah. I mean, definitely, you would like to call doctor Sosa Silva. Right?

Yeah.

They can analyze the text. They're like, this is this isn't quite reek of Jason. There's something just a little bit off of this.

Speaking of word choice, can we do better than reek of Jason?

Reek of Jason.

For want of a better term, I suppose you can keep reek.

So, yeah, this is where forensic linguist come in and then you don't get arrested, hopefully. Right? Okay. But as generative AI gets more sophisticated, Rui thinks that his work is going to get harder.

The developments in generative AI will make it more complicated for forensic linguists to attribute texts, which in turn will mean that forensic linguists will need to do more research and to further their research and to have more fine grained methods of attributing authorship. But there will always be a distinction between the way humans produce text and the way machines generate texts. So things generative AI will evolve, forensic linguistics will evolve, but eventually we will always be able to pinpoint differences between the texts.

So very similarly to the classroom here, this seems like it is just creating piles of work for everybody.

Yeah. It seems like things are just gonna get harder for everyone, which is kind of a bummer. And I know, like, the threatening the politician, like, that's a very dramatic example, obviously. But like you said, with the classroom, the idea I keep coming back to is cognitive offloading and like, not doing all these mental processes and offloading it to AI, which then I guess makes it harder for forensically. Like, there's been studies from Microsoft, from the SBS, Swiss Business School about how people who use generative AI regularly tend to score lower on markers of critical thinking.

Like, there's actual data we have now. Mhmm. Again, I'm painting kind of a scary picture to you. It's like, okay, so our critical thinking may be getting compromised by a technology that is also getting more sophisticated at pretending to be us. And we're also starting to become influenced by the way it writes.

Mhmm. Like, that's just such a weird trifecta.

Right. But doesn't the cycle also work in the other direction? Like, we are the corpus of information that the generative models need to continue their work. And as we lose cognitive function because of offloading, the material that we are able to feed depreciates in value as well, which one imagines leads to worse outputs from machines, which we are synthesizing and further inhibits our ability to think and provide a reasonable corpus of information updated to the moment from which Yeah. The models can select.

It's kind of like this feedback loop. Yeah. Us feeding it and then it influencing us, and then all of a sudden, we're just all speaking Brazilian Portuguese, right?

Yeah.

And getting accused of crimes we didn't commit. And professor Fritz's concern about the feedback loop is that it affects everyone differently.

A lot of people defend, letting students use AI in their work, by saying that they see it as a tool for equity. Maybe for students who, had a less privileged primary education or students for whom English is a second language, I would contend the exact opposite is true. That what this is doing is setting the stage for genuine reading and writing skills becoming something that is really only accessible to the elite class, those with a lot of money and leisure time to cultivate them intentionally. And so that's really something that concerns me quite a bit.

Okay. I'm beginning to see why there's such difficulty forming consensus around this. I mean, initially, I'll be honest, my reaction was yeah. It's obvious that in a space where you're supposed to be practicing thinking and metastasizing your own thoughts that AI is just not helpful. It's not there for any reason except for you to finish the paper, which is a representation of the thoughts you were supposed to be having, and it is like the wrong takeaway from what you're doing in the classroom.

But now that they're applying these frameworks around accessibility, I can see it becoming a little more complicated. I guess a lot of it boils down to how much you think the role of the academy is to prepare you for work, employment, and how much it is to help you engage with how you think and learn. But I'm beginning to see why the stakes are a little more complicated than perhaps they feel at first blush.

Yeah. And then when you think about professor Fritz's role in the committees and how it's just really hard to come to agreement or make any sort of policy, I think this is something that they're gonna continue to wrestle with for a long time.

As for myself, my policy won't be changing. And that's, you know, that's about all I can do about that.

Tori, thank you as always for bringing in a really insightful piece here.

Yeah. Thanks so much for letting me talk about it.

Yeah.

And I just wanted to shout out thanks to professor Fritz and to doctor Sosa Silva.

At least one of whom is probably going to be getting me out of jail over the next couple years. So pre thank you for that one.

Pre thank you for that one.

Tori, where can folks find you and all of the writing that definitively comes from your own brain on the web?

You can find me at toori d p nine 8.bluesky.social. And you can also find my podcast about video games that I make of my own brain and play with my own brain at press-startpod.bluesky.social.

Tuesday, September 23, 10:30AM.

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