AI-Generated Essays: A Deal with the Devil?

This weekend a reel from Tiktok was making the rounds on Twitter. Depicting a young woman frowning at herself in a mirror, it’s captioned, “I will never understand how high schoolers managed before [chatbots]. Your telling me you sat here and wrote a 600 word essay by yourself…”

The post was met with a certain degree of good-natured roasting on Twitter (which, as a text-based platform, at times seems to be the last refuge for those of us who value the written word). Six hundred words, more than one person noted, is not a particularly long essay. Ten years ago, before the internet “pivoted to video,” a certain degree of verbal dexterity was essential for being online. The best posters demonstrated a flair for language. Fan-fiction websites were going to birth a generation of young writers.

And now? A recent survey found that 92 percent of British university students use AI to write essays. Again, these are university students, who should presumably be capable of writing an essay.

If they’re not writing, and they’re not reading, what are they attending school for?

Then, reading back over my folklore notes this weekend, I stumbled across an old legend recorded in The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends, by Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood:

Another notable story, set in the latter half of the seventeenth century, was that of ‘the licentiate of St Andrews.’ A student hoping to be admitted to the Presbytery had been given a text to study, but could make nothing of it (his university career had been far from brilliant). Wandering alone ‘in a remote place,’ he was overtaken by a stranger ‘in habite like a Minister,’ who asked why he seemed so gloomy. The student told his problem, whereupon the gentleman produced from his pocket a sermon on the very text, asking in return only a written promise of service, should it ever be required. The student agreed and, having no ink with him, signed the document in his own blood.

All goes well until the young man encounters Robert Blair, minister of the Kirk of Holy Trinity, who discovers the provenance of the essay and reveals that the student has been hoodwinked by the devil.

The student was overcome with terror, but the Presbytery resolved to save him if they could. Next day they took him to one of the loneliest churches in the district, where each in turn wrestled for the student’s soul in prayer, the last being Mr Blair, during whose fervent supplications a fierce storm began raging, making the kirk tremble to its foundations. Wild demonic laughter and shrieks of rage mingled with the blast. Then there dropped from the roof in their midst the student’s covenant signed in blood. The storm immediately calmed and all was still. Mr Blair had triumphed and the powers of darkness were vanquished.

This rousing tale was recorded by the historian Robert Wodrow in his Analecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences (1701—31), and a similar thing is said to have happened to a minister in France.

Perhaps fewer students would cheat if the end result was a contest with the powers of darkness at midnight.

In the comments to my post about the Tiktok reel, someone mentioned a scene from the 1960 film version of The Time Machine that’s been much on my mind of late. The Time Traveller (played by Rod Taylor) has traveled 800,000 years into the future, expecting that when he arrived he would find an advanced civilization marked by the pursuit of learning. Instead, he finds the Eloi, a race of simple creatures in togas who are bred like cattle, and eaten, by the subterranean Morlocks.

In the film’s most harrowing scene, he’s taken by one of the future humans to a centuries-old library housing the last books in existence, which crumble to dust in his hands.

“What have you done?” the Time Traveller demands, as the dreams of centuries turn to ash. “Thousands of years of building and rebuilding, creating and recreating! A million years, the sensitive men dying for their dreams, for what? So you can swim, and dance, and play.”

When entertainment becomes the highest good, it’s not shocking that people will find clever ways to avoid work and study. But nor should it be surprising when the ultimate fate of the Eloi becomes our own.