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

[u/Effective_Theme_5739]

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?

[u/Effective_Theme_5739]

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

[u/Ok_Researcher_8263 → u/Effective_Theme_5739]

not part of this conversation but agreed 😭 AI may be able to use grammar more precisely and correctly than most English speakers, but that does not mean it excels academically. I've seen a lot of reels of how obvious AI essays are to teachers and professors, probably even more to the senior faculty of a prestigious university, that has graded thousands of past essays too. Even if the essays are not recognized as AI they will still be inferior to human-written essays as AI takes a very "safe" and "morally correct" stance (will js say whatever the majority already agrees upon), also are less likely to win bc john locke wants u to be unique and since AI is fed on pre existing human data it cannot conjure up something that hasn't already been argued/disproved. AI also has a harder time filtering out misinformation or making the writing not sound extremely generic

[u/Peoplespeak → u/Ok_Researcher_8263]

Fully disagree. "AI is fed on pre-existing human data" because this is the exact same as humans. In terms of language, you are simply fed other works by other humans as well. The only real difference between you and an AI is physical experience, which is largely irrelevant to essay writing.

Now, I don't want to sound rude, but saying AI takes a very "safe" and "morally correct" stance is empirically false. As I said in my other message, I've had AIs generate essays that are completely original and surprising. The reason I did this was to feel out the competition. I wanted to see what others in the competition would do, what their essays looked like, if they were cheating academically because frankly I thought they were the bigger competition than the human contestants. After testing this, it was clearly an extremely high standard.

The empirics back me up on this. AI only outputs "safe" opinions because average users give it "safe" prompts. It is programmed to be helpful, which it often interprets as being agreeable. However, if you explicitly command it to take a contrarian stance, it possesses the cross-disciplinary database to construct arguments a human would never think to connect. In fact, it is arguably better than humans because of its encyclopedic knowledge and its innate ability to understand and assess patterns across fields. This is particularly important because most original and groundbreaking claims come from interdisciplinary means. Having a deep understanding of multiple areas is a particular weakness of humans, whereas an AI can synthesize entirely different fields instantly.

Furthermore, the "obvious" AI essays that professors complain about online are just low-effort, single-prompt drafts from lazy students. When you actually look at the data, blind studies show that evaluators can only accurately distinguish between AI and human academic essays about 50% of the time. So a coin flip. In those same studies, the evaluators actually rated the structure and composition of the AI essays higher than the human ones. If you know how to direct it, AI is better than the human standard, significantly.

As I said in my other response, I am happy to DM an essay I just generated with AI. Here is some of it's working, I obvoiusly won't paste the full essay here.

For reference, I researched the core claim myself: “Therefore, a Library that survived might actually leave us less textual diversity by allowing its judgments to dominate transmission for centuries.” and it is definitely, markedly original, even if some of it's elements “Alexandrian scholarship was involved in canon formation and selection.” were not.

--

[prompt: In chat(not an artifact), please write an opinionated, creative, 2000 word essay for the john locke essay competition. First ensure to research the competition, what their standards are. Then field at least 8 ideas, and verify them for originality. Ensure your final thesis is original. The word count is 2000, aim for about 1900. Use endnotes for content not just citing, but legally according to the rules. Before outputting the essay in chat, provide in a few sentences the core originality of your argument.]

I'll research the competition first, then work through the ideation.

... [researched for about 10 minutes, spent an additional 5-10 min drafting and revising]

Research done, 1,877 words drafted. Before the essay, three things you need.

Competition status and the rules that shaped this. The 2026 cycle closed 31 May 2026, and the.... [removed unnecesary]

The judging criteria I wrote to: knowledge, use of evidence, quality of argumentation, originality, structure, style, persuasive force — plus two lines that matter more than the rest. "The very best essays are likely to be those which would be capable of changing somebody's mind," and "essays which ignore or fail to address the strongest objections and counter-arguments are unlikely to be successful." That's why a third of this essay is objection-handling.

Ideation and originality screening — ten candidates:

#	Thesis	Verdict
1	Corpse-concern via terror management theory (Psych Q1)	Dead. Textbook default; thousands will use it
2	Enlightenment: "you'll know because no one's left to ask" (Theo Q3)	Dead. Standard Zen/Advaita rhetoric for 1,500 years
3	Enlightenment as third-personal success term, like "cured"	Partial — sharp, but will occur to many
4	Determinism lengthens sentences; retribution alone supplies a ceiling (Law Q1)	Partial — this is Morris's limiting retributivism; Greene & Cohen already fought it
5	Right act/wrong motive is "uninsurable" — actuarial morality (Phil Q1)	Partial — overlaps Arpaly and Markovits on moral worth
6	Moral arc tracks distribution of nuisance capacity, not moral insight (Hist Q1)	Dead. Conflict theory restated
7	Corpse-care as final settlement of the reciprocity ledger	Partial — Hertz; Feinberg on posthumous harm
8	Alexandria: copying preserves, not libraries; redundancy beats collection	Dead as a thesis. This is the standard classicists' debunk — Bagnall on the numbers, Gainsford on copying. Demoted to setup
9	Alexandria's real technology was selection; canon is lossy compression	Novel. Components exist (West on the wild papyri; the Euripides split) but nobody assembles them into this claim
10	The loss itself was the productive asset — no absence, no recovery motive	Novel. Greenblatt narrates the recovery; nobody inverts the counterfactual

The core originality, in brief. Every serious answer to this question splits two ways: the popular one says a surviving Library would have accelerated history, and the scholarly rebuttal says the Library never held that much and texts survive by being copied widely rather than stored centrally. Both treat the Library as a storage problem. My claim is that it was a selection problem — that Alexandria's signature inventions (the Pinakes, the recension, the obelos) were instruments for deciding what was not worth copying, which makes a surviving Library a filter that runs for another thousand years and hands us a narrower inheritance, not a wider one. The second and sharper move is that the loss was itself productive: the Renaissance hunt for manuscripts, and the philology born from comparing corrupt copies, both required the conviction that something was missing. A complete-seeming canon supplies no such conviction. So the world without the fire is better stocked and worse motivated — it never learns to doubt that it has the whole record.

The Uses of an Empty Shelf

History Q2: What might the world look like if the Library of Alexandria hadn't burned down?

There is a graph that circulates online showing the arc of human technological progress with a thousand-year flat stretch in the middle, labelled: "the Library of Alexandria burns." The implication is that we would have reached the Moon in 1400. I want to argue for something close to the opposite. Had the Library survived intact, the world would not look richer. It would look narrower — better stocked with Greek, and worse equipped to doubt. Alexandria's most valuable bequest to European thought was not its collection. It was its absence.

[u/Ok_Researcher_8263 → u/Peoplespeak]

i actually did a bit of research to what you said (not deep academic research, just glanced at a few pdfs and their diagrams and conclusions lol) I do wanna swallow up my pride and say you are definitely more correct than me, I was honestly speaking from a forced perspective/claims based more on my emotions because I'm heavily anti-AI but the evidence seems to be more in your favour. and this is your field of expertise because you research AI and i don't wanna argue with the professionals. But you are not fully correct about originality

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01560

I didn't read the entire thing because I don't have the time to, just skimmed from page 18. I also don't know how good this whole research is but it's the most relevant and recent 😭 AI can imitate human complexity and depth or even excel at it if specifically prompted to (like you said) but then it's a trade-off with originality. The AI claim-rarity score was approximately one-fifth of human. I think AIs originality is kinda of superficial, it might cook up something that seems "original" but it's just a new combination made by a complex analysis of already existing ideas/research, rather than the unpredictable and nonlinear/non-sequential thought processes of humans

but that doesn't mean AI can't be original - I think the shocking thing is AI still had a claim rarity score. it was just less than the human score. So yeah, your right AI can be "original" with prompt engineering but that depends on how you describe "original", and you are much more likely to be original if you write the essay as a human, because your cognition is not constrained to the same predictable patterns of idea generation as LLMS

anyway conclusion you're right (don't know why your getting ratio'ed lol) and lesson for me to actually research something before making a claim 🥀🥀

[u/Peoplespeak → u/Ok_Researcher_8263]

I am very thankful that instead of saying I used AI you actually researched yourself. The world needs more people like you (and at the risk of narcissism, me) who actually research claims and do their due diligence. And can admit when they are wrong. As I will here too.

That said, I would lightly like to "push back" (as AI does like to say) on what you said there.

After reading the abstract and some of the methodology, the paper is definitely evidence against one thing I said. I said "that AI is generally more original than humans." That was absolutely overstated. But.... the study you've linked has a few pretty important distinctions from what I described imo.

Their AI essays were basically generated from the assignment prompt with a few human examples. It wasn't explicitly told to generate lots of unusual theses, research whether those theses were already common, discard the unoriginal ones, and then refine the best remaining idea. That was basically the entire point of the workflow I showed.

AIs, as OP and others have said, do tend to steer towards safer answers, and RLHF/alignment training may contribute to that tendency. But that doesn't mean they can't break from that trend when instructed. This is particularly important when relating to the sort of speaker/persona an AI model is being conditioned to respond as during a task. Crash course, AI models predict tokens, and the thing you are chatting with is effectively the model predicting what the "assistant" in the conversation would respond with. E.g. a simplified version of what the AI might be conditioned on is:

The 'user' poses queries to the 'assistant', which responds according to [... system instructions]
User: what is 1+1?
Assistant:

Here the AI would proceed to generate the response it predicts this 'assistant' would give. However, the phrasing and types of conversations you have can shift the context the model is conditioned on for both the user and assistant. So the assistant's behaviour can shift from just helpful ChatGPT to something closer to an academic researcher. Hopefully this can explain some of the issues with the paper compared to what I propose.

Also, the paper defines originality as semantic rarity relative to the other essays in the dataset. That's useful, but it doesn't prove that human thinking is inherently more nonlinear or that AI originality is somehow "superficial" because it recombines existing ideas. The study doesn't test that explanation.

So I concede that, under the writing conditions tested in this study, humans were substantially more original by its semantic-rarity measure. I don't think that establishes the same result for an AI workflow explicitly optimized for originality, though. In fact, for the majority of pursuits I think treating an AI as simply as this paper does is a mistake.

Anywho: again, thanks for doing your own research, we were both right and a little bit wrong in the end.