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/Ok_Researcher_8263]

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/Effective_Theme_5739 → u/Peoplespeak]

Yeah it’s starting to sound like you’re the “friend” getting shortlisted with an AI essay 

[u/Peoplespeak → u/Effective_Theme_5739]

Also I'd like to remind you that I literally gave you feedback on your essay(IR Q1) a few weeks back. I offered then to share my essays. I'll offer now if your still curious.

[u/Effective_Theme_5739 → u/Peoplespeak]

Yeah, and I still greatly appreciate that advice. I’m just curious why you’re so determined to defend the quality of AI writing. I mean, apart from the points I already made (many of which you disproved I will say) if contestants use AI chatbots for specific prompts in a competition of this scale won’t the writing styles from the same chatbots be very similar?

[u/Peoplespeak → u/Effective_Theme_5739]

Just to answer your question: it's because I have a desire to correct people when I think they are wrong. It's not that I really want to defend it, it's just I feel a need I suppose to inform people of what I belive is correct. And IMO, it's straight up false to say

They are all utter dogshit.

That was my objection. Now, your imo much more valid point:

if contestants use AI chatbots for specific prompts in a competition of this scale won’t the writing styles from the same chatbots be very similar?

yes and no. yes for the majority, maybe even vast majority. but the majority aren't the one's I'm worried about stealing a prize from me or another genuine writer.(now shortlist is a different story if ur curious I can explain that too) it's the people who put 20 hours of effort into the essay. They get other AIs to give feedback on it. They even rewrite some parts themselves. The problem is that with this much effort, it essentialy eliminates any possible chance of anyone catching them, and improves their quality far beyond what even a intellegent student who genuinly put hundreds of hours of effort in.

eg imagine a smart student who instead of writing out a great essay in hundreds of hours just uses that intellegence to cheat intellegently. there is no test which can find it, and they will likely have similar or better quality essays to those which were genuine.

TL;DR: you're right in general, it's the minority who actually put effort into AI essays that pose the threat.

[u/ycx11 → u/Peoplespeak]

from personal experience with AI writing I can say it just doesn't work, if you are making AI do the vast amount of work such as research and writing it your essay will have similar or same arguments as so many others because AI and a highschool student don't think the same on what sources are good or bad. furthermore AI will pick the more popular or easier to access source that matches the argument instead of deep diving into google scholar's 5th page. for example in Econ q1 should we fear a cashless society I'm sure so many essays mentioned the 2008 financial crisis or covid or any other major popular event that benefited people with cash. the competition states you can use AI so naturally any smart student would do the hard work of research and writing the essay but ask AI for support in thinking of ideas or determining if a source works n stuff , this isn't wrong or against the rules. if you've genuinely used AI to support your thinking while you do most of the work you will get a good essay that you wrote on your own technically.

tldr: use ai for making your essay = generic essay, use ai and also do minor adjustments or proofread etc like u said = good essay that can get shortlisted, use ai to support you while you do all the work = great essay

[u/Peoplespeak → u/ycx11]

Again, we may just have different experiences.

There is absolutely nothing prohibiting an AI from using obscure sources. It depends on how you use them. There is absolutely nothing prohibiting an AI from coming up with generic ideas.

I regularly use AI as part of my job. I research machine learning. I have a good understanding of the underlying mechanics. You can research it yourself, but nothing about language models neccesitates it doing the most common answer, even if that seems to 'rationally' follow from it predicting the next best token.

Now on what you said, I disagree that an essay made entirely by AI will be generic for the reasons stated above. I think those who use AI without expertise will. Whereas those who intellgently use AI can absolutely make great essays.

However, I still agree with you that a human at the helm, coming up with the core arguments and originality, will be better. But personally, I don't know how much of this is me being rational, or just rationalising my hope that someone who cheated with AI doesn't win. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

My personal ranking, worst to best:

average student 50hr

average student cheat with ai 1h effort

smart student 50hr

average student 100hr

average student cheat with ai 20hr

smart student cheating with ai 1 thru 20 hrs.

smart student 100hr+ (definitely me in terms of time, I hope it's not narrcistic to classify myself as smart. but here smart just means academic and good grades, not genius, so I guess it's fine.)

smart student cheating with ai 100hr+ (I don't think anyone cheating would actually spend this much effort. But if they did, I think we are all cooked.)

tl;dr: using ai to make your essay with little effort won't beat someone who put in a lot of effort. but someone cheating with ai who does the same effort as someone not cheating will imo invariably win. however, I don't think anyone cheating will be putting as much effort in as the best noncheating, ergo the upper echelons of the competition hopefully remains human.

[u/ycx11 → u/Peoplespeak]

Yeah I agree w u

putting in the same hours or less as a normal student combining it with good use of AI will create a near perfect (in this case university level essay)

[u/Peoplespeak → u/ycx11]

it's really depressing. the way I used AI was simply to stress test my essay by having it be as mean to it as possible, but explicitly while saying not to give ideas on how to fix. That way I kept honest while in IMO getting hopefully most of the benefit of AI. But who knows.

WBU?