College students use AI to do most of their writing. An increasing number of professors secretly use it for grading. In the limit case, AIs do all the...
College students increasingly use AI for writing assignments, while professors secretly use it for grading. The extreme scenario is that AI does all the work and humans merely transmit AI-generated output, which the post likens to dead code that a compiler would remove.
Background
- Paul Graham (@paulg) is a well-known programmer, venture capitalist, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that launched companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. His tweets on tech and culture are widely followed.
- This post satirizes a growing trend in education: students using generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) to write assignments, while some professors use AI tools to grade them. Graham imagines the absurd endpoint where humans become mere middlemen passing AI content to other AIs.
- "Dead code" and "compiler" are programming metaphors. A compiler translates code into executable programs; dead code is code that runs but produces no effect — a good compiler removes it. Graham is suggesting that if humans are just relaying AI output, they are functionally irrelevant, and an "honest" system would eliminate them entirely.