Being a college teacher was a pretty good job back in the good old days. Why? Because it was easy to know when students were cheating.

Exams were a cinch. Students sitting in desks in a classroom seem to believe they are surrounded by a dome of invisibility, but the fact is that, yes, the teacher standing in front of the class can see what is going on. Shifty eyes, furtive glances at other students’ test papers, weird staring at the soles of shoes or the palms of hands, peering down into half-unzipped jackets — these are not normal behaviors. One encounters them almost exclusively on exam day. Teachers get good quick at catching weasels in class, and weasel hunting was one of my favorite pastimes.

Here’s a fun trick: In a classroom with doors in the front and back of the room, hand out exams, pretend to excuse yourself to go to the restroom, and then walk down the hall on the outside of the classroom before reappearing noiselessly through the rear door. Students with cheat sheets spread out on a thigh under their desk — an arrangement clearly visible from a vantage point in the back corner of any classroom — are sitting ducks. Nabbing a cheater during exams puts the fear of God into everyone, especially the cheater. As a bonus, giving a kid a zero for cheating dramatically reduces the time it would otherwise take to grade his or her exam.

Alas, those days of happy hunting are over. Smartphones, smartwatches, and tiny earbuds killed the sport. It’s nigh impossible to sweep a classroom for advanced technology, especially when the teacher (me) is too far behind the times to know whether a wearable is capable of transmitting forbidden information. At any rate, an earphone the size of a BB tucked inside an ear canal and then covered over with hair is game over for weasel hunters. Add to that the changing dynamics of the classroom and university, with teachers likely to be accused of harassment for trying to root out cheating, and the thrill is gone. I now go through exam day on a short leash, gnashing my teeth, knowing there must be untoward goings-on afoot right under my nose, and dreaming of the time when I once threw cheaters out of my classroom like a champion.

Even though exam-day cheater-detection was rendered obsolete, though, the ability to discover, almost instantly, plagiarism in essays remained for me a source of professional pride. Let me lay it out plainly for the uninitiated. Eighteen-year-olds who go through a semester unable to answer questions about anything, but who suddenly develop an articulate and subtle mastery of the history of the Ottoman bureaucracy in the seventeenth century drawing from a range of sources in half a dozen languages, are probably pulling my leg. I bet any other teacher reading this will have the same skill I do. I, we, can spot plagiarism like hounds can find hunks of bacon in a one-room apartment.

One thing about most plagiarists, especially at the college level or below, is that they are sloppy. They haven’t done the assignment, they panic, they copy-paste something from the internet, put their name on it, and turn it in. Oftentimes the fonts, even the text colors, of the paragraphs they have lifted are different from the paragraphs they have hammered out on their own. Not exactly the Thomas Crown affair. Sometimes plagiarists try to throw teachers off the scent by interspersing a few of their own words with the plagiarized material, but that’s like sprinkling some grass clippings on a bacon chunk. A little amateur obfuscation is no match for a seasoned hunter.

The thrill of the chase may have been taken away from us on exam day, but we teachers, underpaid and overworked and generally not impressed as we are, could still give big fat red-ink zeroes to kids who tried to pass themselves off in final papers as world-class experts in, say, the history of francophone anti-colonialism in Africa or of Arabian cosmological thought.

All that ended a few years ago — not just the good times to be had catching cheaters, but the meaning of my profession. Teaching as a stand-up artform is dead. Teaching as grading and educating, drawing new knowledge out of young learners in a dynamic interaction of minds, is a doornail, a bucket-kicker, a farm buyer, a taker of dirt naps. What ended my lifework? ChatGPT.

Or “CheatGPT,” as I like to call the criminal enterprise. After the release of the free version of ChatGPT back in 2022, students around the world suddenly got really, really good at commenting in online class discussions, doing online quizzes, writing term papers, and crafting impeccable paragraphs in idiomatic prose (even — especially — if the language of output was one in which a student had not demonstrated any particular prior proficiency). Written assignments are no better. Hand-write the answers, I would command. What did I get? Eighty handwritten transcriptions from ChatGPT. At the end of the semester after the unleashing of my nemesis, ChatGPT, I sat at my desk, stared at the term papers, and, as the Chinese say, “ate bitterness.” Perfectly formed essays. Startling insights. Grammatical and syntactical tours de force.

Zero citations.

Hmm.

I did what I usually do, blood rising as I started searching for the unnamed sources of the obviously plagiarized homework. Curiously, though, nothing came up. Same for the other essays. Then it hit me. This was secondary plagiarism. The original plagiarist was ChatGPT. I couldn’t collar that thief. I had been outsmarted, outflanked. I knew, in a flash of insight, that my job was doomed. I went through the motions of writing comments in the margins of papers, as I always do. But I was utterly demoralized. Here I was, grading a chatbot with access to the world’s knowledge and the ability to manipulate it into a final assignment. The machine, via its teenaged intermediaries, was toying with me. I was cornered. I didn’t know what to do besides give good grades to good papers. Without proof of cheating, I couldn’t, in the gentle parlance of the pre-PC educator, nail a kid to the wall. I had to play the farce to the hilt. Tables turned, hoist by someone else’s petard.

Since then I have begged and pleaded with students not to use ChatGPT or any AI of any kind. Some of them listen, but most of them don’t. Why should anyone pay attention to me, anyway? Other teachers encourage students to use AI. The excuses are, to put it mildly, unconvincing. AI, the teachers say, is like a secretary. It finds information so real scholars can think through it. It saves time. It helps one stay organized. It is a revolution in human epistemology.

Baloney juice. It’s all a lie, and I think the “scholars” know it. AI is a clearinghouse of stolen information and ideas. The data that developers used to “train” AI models was scraped, much of it illicitly, from the internet. Not that the internet was any towering achievement. But ethics are ethics. If plagiarism is wrong for a freshman, then it ought to be wrong for a silicon processor. It certainly ought to be wrong for a “scholar.” Stealing from a dime store is the same as stealing from a diamond merchant. Stealing is stealing, wrong is wrong. Right?

Nope. Apparently not. And now I read about “Einstein,” a bot that completes whole courses for students without their having to do much beyond siccing the bot on the homework (see here). Tell Einstein to finish a semester’s worth of work for you and, voila, the work is done. Breezing through college is now as easy as, well, breezing through college. Only now the kids don’t even have to pretend to have learned anything. They just game the system and spend the rest of their time doing God knows what. Four years, a quarter of a million dollars, nothing to show for it, and a soul drenched in sin. Einstein is the death knell for college as even the approximation of an educational experience.

Teachers were up in arms about Einstein. Ha, I say. Like you didn’t know that your students were cheating before Einstein came on the scene. Methinks the faculty doth protest too much. The reason teachers are against Einstein is the same as the reason that horse salesmen were against the Model T. The jig is up and they know it. But it’s not as though any ethical or moral considerations have intervened.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. My job is toast, my profession is a torpedoed vessel. Well, c’est la vie. As parents down the generations have drilled into their kids’ heads, “Nobody ever said life was fair.” What I find galling is the near-wholesale acceptance, even celebration, of something that is not just unfair but clearly wrong. Not my losing my livelihood. I mean the cheating that people continue to call “education.”

I read a really interesting article recently (here). It mentioned the work of Charles Upton and René Guénon. For these men, and others like them who have studied the traditions, especially the religious ones, upon which great civilizations have been built, the invisible world is more important than the visible one. The realities of metaphysics are not to be put off. They impinge on this life, this world. There are things that societies do, many traditionalists say, to ward off the influence of malign entities seeking to do harm to humans. For Upton, as the article explains, UFO sightings are a symptom of the fracturing of the “wall” that once kept unwanted spirits away. What people are seeing in the skies and glowing green upon the Earth, many spiritually-inclined people speculate, are not aliens from other planets but demons, trickster demons who delight in causing confusion in human minds. The whole point is to lead souls away from God.

Readers can make what they will of the article, of Upton and Guénon, and of various theories about UFOs. I find it all fascinating, but that’s not what concerns me here.

What I think is pertinent from the article is that something similar can be said about ChatGPT. Imagine for a moment that it is not just a chatbot. It is that, of course. It was developed as such. The data scraping is real. The plagiarism is real. The use of an electronic plagiarism wizard to cheat on homework and “scholarship” is real.

That’s just what I’m getting at. We used to have moral codes grounded in religion. It used to be that people were ashamed, or at least taught to be, about doing things they shouldn’t do. There was a wall between us and bad spirits.

That wall is now not just cracked, but rubbled. When exorcists and other priests speak of a surge of sin in the world, I think that is what they mean. ChatGPT works only because the moral reins that once kept us from wallowing in sin have been dropped. Folks used to try to hide their wrongdoing. Now they monetize and commodify it. And everyone else jumps on the bandwagon, fearing to be the last one to discover how much fun it is to go sinning. Everyone is doing it! The devil, meanwhile, is having a field day. And he is using all sorts of things to drag us down deeper into the pit with him. One of his most effective strategems is ChatGPT — or what the Bible calls the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Each chat portal is a low-hanging apple, waiting to be plucked. I will tell you of signs and wonders. I will perform those for you on demand. I will open to you the mind of God. I will instruct you in the knowledge of things hidden since the foundation of the world. All you have to do is accept the use of stolen ideas. It’s not like you stole them, though. It wasn’t really stealing at all. It was R&D. It was necessary because we can’t let the Russians or the Chinese have this technological prowess, can we? It is for the good of mankind that we do this work. A little ethical corner-cutting in the back room, but, well, you see how popular the product is. Use ChatGPT and make it easy on yourself. Let it do some homework for you. You deserve a break! Relax, don’t be such a stickler for the rules. Cheat, just a little. Prop open the door, just a hair. And paths will be made straight for you, all will go your way.

ChatGPT — CheatGPT — is very subtactile evil. It is wily, clever, practiced, polished, and pearly-smooth. It is a liar. It is born of theft. It comes, ultimately, from the father of lies.

CheatGPT has destroyed education in its current form. It has almost certainly put me and many other teachers out of a job. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

But that’s not the downbeat to this eerie little tune. The song leads us astray. It is a recapitulation of moral collapse as knowledge advancement. We teachers, those of us who foist CheatGPT on our charges, are Pied Pipers once removed. We do unspeakable harm to kids when we prod them to do what is not right. We destroy their souls even while we poison and corrupt their minds.

Kids in classrooms with cheat sheets were a feature of classrooms since the first test was administered. People who sat for state examinations in imperial China were sometimes caught wearing robes lined with whole passages from the Confucian classics. Teachers don’t just teach, they correct and admonish. They draw out the good and the bad from pupils, encouraging the one and throttling the other. Not now, though. Now we put the robes on the pupils and teach them how to use them. Woe to us, peddlers of CheatGPT. Woe to those who lead God’s children astray.

Teachers who deceive are not teachers. CheatGPT is no teacher, either. It is a demonic catspaw. If you are a student, or a teacher, or anyone else reading this, please, stop using the thing. Cheating is sinful, no matter how slick the broker. Or haven’t you heard that kind of truth in Sunday School?