The Great Zombification

THE NEW CRITICUntitled, Kit KnuppelOwen Yingling is a 21-year-old writer and assistant editor of The New Critic from Arlington, Virginia. He studies Philosophy at The University of Chicago.Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.Take the infamous photograph of a UCLA student showing off a ChatGPT window at graduation. What exactly does it mean? There are a million silly articles and think-pieces that unwittingly engage with it at the most charitable level: the student is showing off how he used ChatGPT to cheat on his essays, complete his final project, whatever, in order to graduate. Cheating on examinations is not particularly interesting or new. “Perhaps,” these pieces seem to chide in a stern parental voice, “the schools need to really crack down on AI because it makes cheating so much easier.” This is a cozy and noble sentiment that conflates a difference in kind with a difference in degrees. I do not think anyone over the age of 23, even if you are a teacher, graduate student, or professor, understands the extent to which AI usage affects every appendage of the university system.The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.I did not really notice the sing-songy cadence in the voice of one of my professors until my friend pointed it out: “Do you think he’s writing his lectures with Chat?” I am a tired and lazy student. The senior slump has started a quarter too early for me. “Who cares,” I thought.Clinically, I wonder if this marks the transition to the metastatic phase. When I arrived at UChicago, LLMs seemed like nothing more than a benign tumor.

I remember that a fraternity’s ill-concoted plot to use AI on an asynchronous midterm ended with most of them getting 70s. And I remember my logic professor laughing at the poorly reasoned answers to homework questions that ChatGPT would give. I don’t think she was laughing two years later when I was TAing the class and we observed a fairly distinct gap of about 40 percentage points between the take-home test and the one administered in-person.The transition to Stage I, an aggregation of harmful tumorous cells, was not particularly alarming at UChicago because it was localized in an area already treated as a bit of an academic joke: the business economics specialization, a recently created moneymaker bemoaned by the traditional UChicago student as a portal for frat types and generic ‘elite human capital’ types, viewed even by most participants (mostly double-majors; myself included) as a bit of a beach vacation, a cool relaxing respite from the rigor of the rest of UChicago.In the typical “bizcon” class, a student must complete six or seven lazily graded problem sets and take a midterm and final exam. Professors always release one or more sample exams before the test date. There is almost no math above the simplest algebra, no thinking beyond the rote repetition of problems and concepts covered on the lecture slides. Some of the required classes must be taken at the business school, where the professors always marvel at our blank stares and how few questions we have compared to the MBA students. To get an acceptable grade, there is rarely any need to do anything besides reviewing the sample exams and problem sets come test time, and there is certainly no pressing requirement to attend class or actually complete these problem sets yourself. In short, bizcon classes are the perfect primary site for cancerous growth.The growth soon spread to the standard economics department. Last year, a friend of mine took Statistics 244, a popular econ elective, and reported the following scene inside the exam room:Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“But people literally Chatted the whole exam Teacher sat in the front of the class and didn’t gaf”During the exam, students were pulling out phones and taking photographs of the test to submit to LLMs before copying down machine-written responses into their blue books.I was disturbed but not surprised when I began to see intrusions into the humanities.

Typically, each fraternity deals with one or two plagiarism cases a year in the mandatory humanities courses, but after sophomore year and the release of GPT 5, the cases (allegedly) went down and the grades went up.Parallel growth marked the next stage. I was asleep in my Cairo hotel bed, studying abroad, when Sidechat, UChicago’s anonymous social media platform, made a tremendous discovery: The Maroon, our school newspaper, had published two articles completely written by AI. This had gone unnoticed for a few months before the only UChicago student with free time on his hands decided to see what sort of groundbreaking coverage of Chicago-area sports The Maroon might have and was certainly dejected to realize that instead of being furnished insider scoops on the Bulls’ roster moves, he was stuck reading sentences like: “Chicago’s perfect start isn’t a fluke; it’s the product of cohesion,” and “And through it all, there’s Giddey — the calm in the chaos, dictating the tempo and keeping the team grounded in the momentum.”It should have been clear then that AI use was not simply a matter of academic misconduct. It could not be dealt with solely through reforming the baffling university disciplinary system, which is consistently content to grab twenty or so kids a year and suspend them for a year or two for cheating on an assignment or exam.In the months since The Maroon case first aroused my suspicions, I’ve noticed a raft of student publications publishing partially or fully AI-generated pieces. There is a rather infamous new campus “journal” advertised with bombastic posters on every cork board that, if you bothered to scan their QR codes or navigate to their Instagram, you’d realize is a sort of unintentional Moltbook. Every piece is written with what appears to be no human effort whatsoever and is met with a corresponding lack of engagement from actual people.And so perfect parallel constructions fill the lecture halls, the take-home tests, the school newspapers, and perhaps even the idiom of student chatter. Given all of the decay I’d seen over the past couple of years, my realization that even professors had begun to succumb to the digital disease was tinged with the relief of a terminal patient that the fight was finally over.But I am starting to fear that this cancer has more grandiose ambitions than the death of its host.

In April, The University of Chicago announced that “Rika Mansueto, AB’91, and Joe Mansueto, AB’78, MBA’80,” had made a $50 million gift “to advance UChicago research and support faculty in AI.” According to the university, aside from funding AI research projects, the money will “[support] a dozen projects that promote a wide range of pedagogical innovation, seeking to expand and leverage machine learning and AI in the classroom” — the final clause of the sentence is remarkably out of tune with the rest “— or to deliberately limit the use of AI.” This addition is too jarring to be ignored but too offhanded to be treated seriously: Here is a suspicious island in this placid sea of buzzwords and well-worn phrases.“AI in the classroom!” screech the other top universities:“At Harvard we are exploring how GAI tools can open up new ways of teaching and learning.”“Over the next five years, Yale will commit more than $150 million to support faculty, students, and staff as they engage with AI.”And Columbia’s “Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI site features ways to leverage AI for teaching, course design, and learning activities.”A computer-made problem set from an Honors Physics classEveryone knows about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis — the “zombie ant-fungus” made infamous in those Natural Geographic videos we watched in middle school. I believe I am watching the spontaneous generation of something similar. Recently, I sat next to someone in class for 10 weeks and watched, baffled, as they slowly began to turn all facets of their life over to an LLM. First, it was their homework. They used Chat to generate answers to dry problem sets while ignoring whatever was being taught up on the board. Then it was their emails. Extension asks à la Claude became coffee chat requests became “write me a nice thank you note to send my professor,” before spilling over onto fragmentary text messages, gym routines, summaries of books read for pleasure, and perhaps even a long message to send a girl. I was astonished then, but it is not hard to understand how this sort of thing happens.I recently reread a prophetic Scott Alexander fantasy story from 2012 known as “The Whispering Earring.”

This earring is a very curious and familiar artifact:“...when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form ‘Better for you if you…’ The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own…As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring’s commands momentous on the level of ‘Become a soldier.’ No more are they even simple on the level of ‘Have bread for breakfast.’ Now they are more like ‘Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way’ or ‘Articulate the letter p.’ The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.”In an increasingly large number of spheres, there are tremendous object-level “benefits” to using artificial intelligence, not least in the cutthroat world of elite universities where students are asked to balance a 4.0, a not-insubstantial number of extracurriculars, a rich social life capable of absorbing the stress of the prior asks, and a number of biological constraints involving sleep and nutrition, as well as caffeine, nicotine, and adderall intake.In this world, the more you offload the areas you cannot cultivate sufficient care for, the better you will perform. So the best universities are not teaching students to be wise, to be a banker or consultant, to be an “indoctrinated” leftist academic, or to be a rich elitist prick. The best universities preach the efficiency, convenience, and countless other benefits of chaining one’s intellect to a very charming machine.Maybe I’m describing college in overly resplendent words, for the modern university is a schizophrenic institution. It is as often as filthy, pointless, and degradable as it is alluring and edifying.