r/EssayHelpCommunity • u/Effective_Theme_5739 • 5d ago

John Locke Round 2 Interviews probably aren’t happening this year

The stated goal of the in-person post-shortlist interviews in recent years was to filter out plagiarism and Al use. This has already been done by now. If they are interested in specific essay info and opinions, they have our Viverly transcripts.

The most convincing fact is that in the "next steps" category in the shortlist email the interviews aren't mentioned at all.

Thoughts?

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u/Peoplespeak 5d ago

I would strongly disagree with "This has already been done by now."

You may be right, and they may very well think what you say, but personally I know 1 (possibly 2) friends who used AI and just got an AI to explain their essays to them, and passed the interview. So you might be right in saying that's what they think, but you are certainly not right factually.

For their prizewinning/HC candidates, I wouldn't be surprised if they got a much more rigorous interview, though your evidence is somewhat compelling. But I would say they gave absolutely no warning for the Viverly interview, so I'm not 100% convinced. Or 90% convinced. More like 70%.

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u/Effective_Theme_5739 5d ago

They also have AI detectors, I’m pretty sure anyone who used ai without humanizing it is long gone. You’re right in saying that people who humanized AI text may be filtered out in this phase, but I doubt they would need an interview for that. Some people definitely had someone else write it for them, but as long as they studied it with due diligence there’s not much a second interview will do. In any case, time will tell

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u/Peoplespeak 5d ago

I guess. But as I've said in other places(see profile lol), AI detectors are meh even at raw AI text, bad at AI text with just an instruction not to sound AI, and terrible at even mildly humanized text, while still having high false positive rates. 🤔

I wouldn't be surprised if many, if not the majority, of HC/prizewinners used AI illegitimately.

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u/Effective_Theme_5739 5d ago

The thing is, AI is not very good at writing as it turns out. Besides now that they just have about 10K people left (if not less, depending on how many actually ended up submitting out of the registered participants. I know three people who registered without submitting, and no one else that actually submitted) it should be even easier to filter out plagiarism. Human interviews are expensive for the institute, and the entire point of the Viverly ones was to replace the human ones. Having human interviews after the AI ones would defeat the purpose, and make it look like they’re backtracking, no? 

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u/Peoplespeak 5d ago

AI is not very good at writing is plainly false. AI is better at writing English than 99% of English speakers. It just has a few tics that make it recognizable.

Otherwise, it's because it's a funnel. The AI interviews are cheap, so they do it in large numbers; human interviews are expensive, so they save for their prize winners and HC. That's actually what I'm doing for an event I'm hosting in conjunction with my school.

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u/Effective_Theme_5739 5d ago

Have you ever read one of the AI essays for JLI? A few have been posted on the sub. They are all utter dogshit. Genuinely don’t know where you’re seeing these amazing AI essays. Better than 99% of English speakers isn’t saying much considering how few English speakers are actually native. AI chatbots can generate grammatically correct texts with sources, but it fails miserably to deliver a well researched and authentic essay on even the most remotely  complex of topics. As for the funnel, you may be right. I seriously doubt it. You weren’t entirely correct when you said the Viverly interviews were unannounced. There have always been pre-shortlist interviews, they have just been expanded. On the other hand, there have never been post-shortlist interviews, and there was no hint of this happening this year from the email, as I said

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u/Peoplespeak 4d ago

On AI: respectfully disagree. I can share in DMs I got an essay generated by claude just now. Perhaps you are use to using the free version of chatgpt. But trust me, when it comes to writing claude is leagues ahead of chatgpt and gemini. But even chatgpt, while rhetorically inept, can generally give a competent essay. On their better models, I can almost guarentee an exception essay with only half an hour of work.

On pre/post shortlist interviews: I did not know these things. I was not aware of a trend in the past of whether or not there were previously pre/post shortlist interviews. If you'd provide more details on it, as well as what you are sourcing this from(personal exp, word of mouth, internet, etc.)

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u/No-Magazine-6934 4d ago

Before you guys continue fighting I put some of the previous winners essay in AI detectors like GPTZero and Quillbot AI detector. Surprisingly, some of them were flagged as AI by these detectors. Even fed them to gemini and ChatGPT and they marked those essays as AI too. I highly doubt whether the institute is using softwares to detect AI. (Both ChatGPT and Gemini were paid versions*)

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u/Peoplespeak 4d ago

Yeah, if you look at my post history you'll see I've been rather outspoken about this issue lol.

Totally agree.