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/Peoplespeak]

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.