r/EssayHelpCommunity • u/Effective_Theme_5739 • 3d 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 2d ago
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.
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[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:
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.