The Slippery Slope of 'Just This Once' (5MF)

Craig [00:00:00]:

Welcome to Live Well and Flourish. I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke. Hey, this is a bit of a hot take of something that's been bothering me lately. I'm pretty into ChatGPT, the new AI tool that's kind of taken the world by storm. And because of that, I monitor some of the social media about ChatGPT pretty closely, including conversations that occur about other topics, such as students using ChatGPT and other AI tools to write papers. While it's okay to use these tools to help you out, it's really not okay to use them to write whole papers. Sometimes on social media, particularly Reddit, I see some kind of amusing posts in which students left in ChatGPT language like “as an AI model” or something similar in their papers which makes it pretty likely that they'll get caught. What's more disturbing is some posts are from students who actually used ChatGPT to write papers and then were caught and accused of cheating.

Craig [00:01:06]:

And most of these seem to be from panicky students who actually did cheat and know that they cheated. And I want to be really clear about this. What I'm talking about in this episode is different from a student who messes up, you know, didn't quite know where the boundaries are. It's a little blurry right now, just what you can do and what you can't do. But these are, what I'm talking about here are students that actually cheated. They know they cheated, they did it intentionally, they made a decision to do what they knew was wrong. So the advice on Reddit seems to fall into 2 camps, you know, suck it up, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, or more often the advice is never to admit to anything. Claim you didn't do it, make them prove it, that sort of thing.

Craig [00:01:54]:

Basically, the advice is to lie their butts off. Now, leaving aside the question of whether or not this will actually work, it usually doesn't because students get panicky and it's kind of easy to tell when they've been lying. Even if it does work, let's say it does work for a second, it's a really bad long-term idea. Essentially, these students are being told to sell a little piece of their integrity and a little bit of their soul. These comments make me think of Clayton Christensen's excellent article in Harvard Business review called How Will You Measure Your Life. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And it's really a fantastic article, but one part of it involves what Christensen calls incorrectly applying marginal cost logic. So when you apply marginal cost logic, you're looking at what's the cost of doing the wrong thing just this once.

Craig [00:02:56]:

And that cost can seem kind of low. This comes out of accounting and managerial accounting and management. But the idea is that you look at the cost of doing the wrong thing just this one time. But here's the problem. It usually doesn't turn out to be just this once. The marginal cost seems very low. It's just this one time. And as Christensen put it, this suckers you in.

Craig [00:03:25]:

You don't see the long-term cost of making the bad choice. But every time you act in ways that don't measure up to being the sort of person you want to be, it's just that much easier to act contrary to being the sort of person you want to be, contrary to virtue, the next time. Every little conscious premeditated slip, I don't know that we can even call them a slip. Every little conscious premeditated decision makes it that much easier to act badly the next time. Not that I've ever done this or ever will, but you know, you cheat on your spouse once, you know, maybe it's a little bit easier to cheat the next time. You know, you lie once, it's a little bit easier to lie the next time. And so rather than building a habit of being a good person, you start not only breaking that habit, you can start to build a habit of acting badly. So you start to not only not move towards being the sort of person you want to be, you start moving away from being that sort of person.

Craig [00:04:31]:

And so over time, with every little just this once, these students go from being an honest person to being a dishonest person, a stinking lying liar. I don't like liars. Now this is different from unintentional slips. We all make little mistakes and act contrary to virtue in the moment, and that's not good and you don't want to do that. It's one of the reasons you want to build up a habit of acting correctly. But it happens. And so that's not what I'm talking about here. Here I'm talking about these intentional, conscious decisions to do the wrong thing.

Craig [00:05:12]:

What makes this ChatGPT student situation so bad is that students compound their initial mistake. You know, they were acting with a lack of integrity. They double down on it. So they not only cheated, they start to lie about the cheating. And that's really bad. So they're violating all sorts of virtues, honesty, integrity, courage, justice, even wisdom, by favoring those short-term over the long-term. Plus, they're just being weak. Doing the right thing sometimes takes strength.

Craig [00:05:45]:

We can apply this to all sorts of other areas as well, but I feel like I've kind of made my point here, so I'm going to try to wrap up. Sometimes doing the right thing is hard, but it's a long-term investment in your character and your flourishing. Intentionally choosing to violate virtues and act out of alignment with who you want to be gets easier each time you do it and that puts you down a very bad path and moves you away from flourishing and being the kind of person you really want to be. So choose to be a good person. Choose to be the sort of person that you want to be. A person of good character. A person of virtue. Yeah, you're gonna make mistakes along the way.

Craig [00:06:27]:

That's okay. You just want to learn from them. But don't intentionally make it harder to live an excellent life. All right, that's it for this time. Thanks.