“Start cheating. Because when everyone does, no one is.”
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That’s the one-line summary of the “manifesto” for Cluely, an AI app. It’s an “undetectable assistant that sees your screen and hears your audio” and “feeds you answers in real time” that you can then copy and utter, say, during meetings (or dates, as the creepy video in this LinkedIn post suggests). It’s for computers now, but no doubt it or something like it will be available at some point for phones, smart glasses, and smart contact lenses, and perhaps, ultimately, our brains.
No longer will you need to think up stuff to say yourself. As the makers of Cluely say, “Why memorize facts, write code, research anything—when a model can do it in seconds?”
This kind of technology—and the mentality behind it—is what educators are up against. Perhaps what humanity is up against.
The folks at Cluely have an interest in their clientele remaining clueless about the collective action problems accompanying their technology. They say, “If there’s a faster way to win—we’ll take it.” But what will actually happen if most people take it?
When you and your colleagues and clients and competitors are all communicating by parroting Cluely’s suggestions, where’s your advantage? When you and your date are telling each other what Cluely (and its in-app advertisers, no doubt) tells you to tell each other, does that sound like the kind of date you want to be on?
When we don’t need to have any facts at our command to make our way in the world, are we more powerful or more vulnerable?
Does any of this sound like winning? Perhaps to the people selling us Cluely.
Cluely isn’t the only firm that thinks it’s a smart marketing strategy to tell us they’ll be relieving us of the need to think. Here’s an ad from Turing on display at an airport:
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Relatedly, below is a nice recent public philosophy talk by philosopher Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State University) that’s worth watching and sharing, in which he makes the case for the value of asking, “Will using this AI tool really make my life better?” Good question.
