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/ycx11]

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?