Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 09/23/2025 at
11:56AM eastern, and we have a slightly late show for you this
week. Sorry about that. I got a toddler cold, and we're in the
middle of renegotiating AI Mike's contract, but we're here.
We made it. We did it. In our third ever show length segment,
contributing producer Tori Dominguez Peak returns to look
at artificial intelligence in the classroom, including one
instructor who has said no more and has banned its use entirely.
Tori tells Jason what that entails and tackles the old
Kennard is writing, thinking, and also bop spotter. But right
now, we're gonna take a quick break.
You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member
feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the
things that have happened since the last time you heard from us.
Hello? Is it five stories for you this week you're looking
for? YouTube is reinstating the channels of creators previously
suspended for violating COVID nineteen and election
disinformation guidelines an alphabet lawyer says are no
longer in force.
This according to a document obtained by Fox News and
prepared for the US house judiciary committee. Reflecting
on the company's commitment to free expression, Daniel f
Donovan, counsel for alphabet rights, YouTube will provide an
opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the
company terminated their channels for repeated violations
of COVID nineteen and elections integrity policies that are no
longer in effect. YouTube takes seriously the importance of
protecting free expression, the document states elsewhere, and
access to a range of viewpoints. The document also explicitly
points out that YouTube has not, does not, and will not employ
any kind of fact checking or labeling mechanism in its
software. At time of writing, no list of the channels to be
potentially reinstated has been published, but I bet it's not
that hard to figure out who might be on it.
In completely unrelated news, Alex Jones recently appeared on
his show sporting a Hitler mustache about which he said, I
could tell you it had a wild effect on women.
Jason Oberholtzer: Ew.
Mike Rugnetta: The US Secret Service shut down a high powered
cellular network that they claimed posed a threat to tri
state area mobile communications this week. CBS News reports
that, quote, law enforcement discovered 300 SIM servers over
a 100,000 SIM cards, enabling encrypted anonymous
communication and capable of sending 30,000,000 text messages
per minute that could have, again, allegedly disabled cell
phone towers and launched a distributed denial of service
attack with the ability to block emergency communications like
EMS and police dispatch, end quote. Secret service claims the
operation was well funded and possibly under control of state
actors looking to cause trouble for UN week in New York.
Independent tech auditors and security analysts are not so
convinced. Well funded, yes, but capable of causing such
widespread havoc in New York City of all places, not so much.
There is nothing about this infrastructure that would be
hugely disruptive or damaging to mobile phone networks, writes t
profit, the self described telecom informer for Hacker
Magazine 2,600 on Blue Sky. BookTok has managed to shoot
Timothy Snyder's lean but weighty 2017 book on tyranny to
the top of indie bookshop sales lists over the last few months.
On Tyranny's bullet point style format and short chapters,
writes Laura Miller for Slate, make it easy to break into
nuggets of exhortation. A particular favorite is lesson
number one, do not obey in advance, urging individuals and
institutions not to appease authoritarian governments before
they are even asked to. Some fans on TikTok temporarily turn
over their accounts to On Tyranny, reading one chapter
aloud per video until they've narrated the whole thing.
Speaking of TikTok, an alleged so called framework deal has
been penned regarding the sale of the Chinese owned platform to
domestic concerns. The US government and ByteDance have
brokered a forthcoming deal whereby Oracle, Silver Lake
Technology Management, and Andreessen Horowitz would
oversee TikTok's US operations. This group would have an 80%
ownership share, and a member of the board would be appointed by
the US government. President Trump has also suggested Fox
News Baron Rupert Murdoch will likely be involved somehow. The
US based owners would lease TikTok's infamous algorithm,
which Oracle would oversee and, quote, retrain.
Larry Ellison, CTO and founder of Oracle, has also recently
financed a number of large scale media mergers with his son,
David Ellison. Paramount Skydance controls CBS, Paramount
Pictures, and the streamer Paramount Plus. The Ellisons are
also allegedly eyeing a takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery,
which owns, among other things, CNN. And finally, get ready for
a really good sentence. You ready?
Ready for this good sentence? Here we go. Limewire, relaunched
as an NFT marketplace, has purchased the rights to the
infamous fire festival brand. The New York Times reports that
the purchase was made for 245,000 US dollars in an eBay
auction. It is unclear what Limewire fire will become.
The music downloader turned NFT peddler is apparently aiming for
something that, quote, expands beyond the digital realm and
taps into real world experiences, community, and
surprise, a thing which no doubt aligns well with the fire
festival brand. Ew. In show news this week, if you ordered a t
shirt, they are being printed next week. Once the print is
done, they will head to Neverpost HQ where they will be
packed and shipped one by one by hand with love. We will also
have very few stock designs available at the end of that
process.
I'm gonna let you know in the show news portion of future
episodes when and where you can snag those if you missed out.
But when I say very few, I really mean it. We're gonna
have, like, fewer than 10 stock shirts. And finally, holy cow,
we are a signal podcast award finalist in the technology
category. That is fun.
Heck yeah. If you could please go vote for us, we would love
that. We'll put a link in the show notes. We are up against
some really rad folks, including close all tabs, who you may
remember from our hentai segment and kill switch of whom we're
just generally fans. But please go vote for us.
We will love you forever. Signal awards, technology category,
there's a link in the show notes. Okay. That's the news I
have for you this week. In this episode, Tory talks with Jason
about AI in the classroom.
But first, BopSpotter is a project by Riley Walls, and it's
described this way. Somewhere in the Mission District of San
Francisco is a microphone pointed down at the street
below. It is using a Shazam manner. So in our interstitials
this week, Hans took it upon himself to recreate what he
imagined to be the sonic environment at the time of some
spotting. So what you are about to hear are not field
recordings, but carefully crafted audio collages
Jason Oberholtzer: Midnight, 12AM. 03:30AM. So I'm sitting
here at my desk today, watching the leaves slowly change color
when an email comes in, From friend of the show, Tori
Dominguez Peek, who submitted to us a year ago a piece you might
remember, wherein AI chatbot companies reached out to her
with the proposition of turning her deceased mother into an AI
chatbot. Well, Tori is back with another piece. I asked, what's
it about?
No one would let me know. Tori wanted to tell me herself. So
please, welcome back to Neverpost, Tori.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Hey, Jason. Thanks so much for bringing me
on.
Jason Oberholtzer: I'm excited to learn what I'm about to
learn.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So today, I have a tale for you about AI on
college campuses and Brazilian Portuguese and solving crimes.
Jason Oberholtzer: All three of my biggest interests. Let's get
started.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Story in three acts, the Aspheric life.
So Jason, like you said, fall is in full swing.
Jason Oberholtzer: Absolutely.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: I have I have purchased pumpkin spice
lattes. The leaves are crunching. Sure. Hans has been
cooking beans.
Jason Oberholtzer: Hans has been cooking beans. I'm up to five or
six layers every time I leave the house.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And with fall happening comes a new
semester on college campuses everywhere across The US. And so
kind of with that comes the renewed conversation that people
have been having about AI in education, and is it cheating,
and like all of the things. Sure. So earlier this year, the
New Yorker ran this piece with the title, everyone is cheating
through college. And the whole crux of it was just talking
about like how commonplace it is for students to use ChatGPT or
to use it to like help with assignments or even going as a
part of like, write my term paper for me.
Jason Oberholtzer: Mhmm.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Blurring the line between getting it to
help you and then like, what has become plagiarism. And like, the
most stunning part about that article to me that I still think
about is they did a very small survey. It was like a thousand
college students. But 90% of them had said they had used
ChatGPT to help with homework assignments.
Jason Oberholtzer: And you found this surprising?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. Mean, just the the number was wild. I
knew it would be over 50. When I saw 90, I was like, oh, we're
cooked. Okay.
But I just couldn't stop thinking about like, what
happens when we are letting a piece of technology kind of do
the thinking for us or do the talking for us
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: On that scale. And so I decided to talk
to someone.
Megan Fritts: When I'm working on a new paper, I'll be, you
know, typing up some section and realize I don't know how to
phrase it. And that tells me, oh, okay, I need to go figure
out what I actually think here. Because if I can't write about
it, that indicates a lack of understanding there. So I think
what we're missing when we stop writing ourselves is the ability
to check ourselves for misunderstandings.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So that's a professor I interviewed. She's
professor Megan Fritz. She teaches philosophy at University
of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Jason Oberholtzer: I find it really interesting here that
she's using misunderstandings as a framing. As if like we are
interrogating our own brain when we set down to write. Yeah. That
feels pretty right to me. Tori, can I ask you a question
quickly?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Sure.
Jason Oberholtzer: Did you cheat in college?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: No. I cheated in high school though.
Jason Oberholtzer: Did you cheat in ways that you think
fundamentally changed your understanding or inhibited your
understanding of what you were doing? Or did they just help you
get a better grade?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Okay. Let me just lay out the one scenario
that I cheated and I could help you could help me here.
Jason Oberholtzer: Mhmm.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So I was failing chemistry. And so one
thing I noticed was that kids who took a long time to take the
test, it was like third period. And then you had fourth period
and then there was lunch. And so I was like, oh, if I just take
forever on this test, I can finish it later and study for it
during fourth period.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And so I was just like, oh, it's just
taking me forever. I have a headache. Like, I guess I have
to come back for lunch. And like, come back during lunch and
finish up this test. Bell rings, I go to fourth period.
It's like my study hall period. I'm like study I'm like going
over the stoichiometry formulas. I'm hitting the books. And then
I lunch happens. I go back to the chem room.
I actually reanswered some stuff because I was like, I have it in
my brain fresh now.
Jason Oberholtzer: Beautiful.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And I took it. Is that cheating? It kind of
is.
Jason Oberholtzer: I well, yeah. I mean, by the letter of the
law, but it's gamesmanship is what I think it is. Like, you
still
Tori Dominguez-Peak: the player.
Jason Oberholtzer: Like Yeah. You still walked in there with
the requisite knowledge or the understanding of how to find the
knowledge, and you applied your brain to the problems at hand
and Yeah. Got a better grade to them. Under the framework that
professor Fritz is setting out here, that seems to be a
different kind of malfeasance in the classroom. And one that I
perhaps look more fondly on.
I cheated constantly.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Okay.
Jason Oberholtzer: Either buy more time because I had not
prepared myself sufficiently on time, or route myself around
rote memorization which I considered to be an impediment
to learning and not a benchmark by which you measured learning.
And honestly, resented having to regurgitate things that one
could find in a book onto a page later. So I count neither of
those things as cheating. But like the thinking that I had to
do with that information still happened in my head and hit the
page.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: That's the thing. Like, I was still
studying.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: I just convinced my chem teacher that I
had a headache when I didn't. Perfect. Right? Yeah. But I was
not plugging formulas in the chattypety and being like, what
are the answers to these questions?
Which I think is kind of different.
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And professor Fritz wrote this
article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I will
read you out loud an excerpt because I think it says
something like really poignant. It says, we're not simply
frustrated by just trying to police AI use or the labor of
having to write up students for academic dishonesty or the way
that reading student work has become a rather nihilistic task.
Our frustration is not merely that we don't care what AI has
to say and therefore get bored grading papers. It is that we
actively miss reading the thoughts of our human students.
Jason Oberholtzer: That is so dispiriting. Wow. Famously easy
job gets easier.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: It's kind of a bummer. And she is like
hitting something here. Like, when you write down something on
a page, you are transmuting your thoughts onto a page. And when
you turn it in, your instructor is reading your thoughts. Like,
we know there is a relationship between writing and thinking.
Jason Oberholtzer: Right. Exactly. And I like that she's
extending it to like a relationship between people on
either side of that activity. You will have a relationship
with your thoughts to the writing and the people reading
your writing have a relationship to those thoughts and therefore
you. And I think that is probably one of the great joys
of teaching is to be in relationship with those people
via their thoughts.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. And I I kind of got to this sort of
thing like writing and thinking and like how they're related.
And I asked her, hey, is writing basically the same thing as
thinking or are they kind of intertwined in some way? And she
was like, yeah, they definitely are related. And that we write
it to document our thoughts, but we also write to come up with
thoughts.
It's kind of this really unique like both and relationship.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. You definitely you write to find
when you have to stop writing because you don't know what's
there, and then you have to go think about it.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. I mean, whenever I write a script
for Neverpost, I will write like a paragraph and then walk away,
and then come back like two days later. And then, you know, it's
just it's a slow process. But it's because I'm in relation
with my brain and trying to figure it out. And then I'm also
doing something that is also very thinking heavy, which is
I'm learning a second language.
I spoke more Spanish as a kid growing up in a Latin American
household. And then I lost it as it became a teenager. And then
I'm trying to get back into it as an adult. Mhmm. And so like,
when I speak Spanish in my adult learner's Spanish class, I'm
like having a thought in English and then translating it in my
head and then saying it out loud to them in Spanish, right, to my
instructor.
Sure. And then she says something back to me in Spanish,
and then I'm trying to translate it into English in my head. And
it's just this very like mechanical relationship, and
it's not easy. And I feel a little bit like a baby alerting
to speak for the first time.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Okay. So if I'm if I'm hearing this
right then, it's like you're sort of seeing the the the gap
between the thought that you're having and your ability to
articulate it in this seconds now. I guess, re seconds, third,
second, again, language. Probably especially because at
one point, it was not there.
And you're feeling this, like, this break in the chain between
you having a thought and being able to articulate that. Yeah.
And that feels sort of similar to what you think is happening
with the insertion of these AI tools into the way people are
writing these days.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. And professor Fritz kind of brought
this up that AI is kind of this middleman between thought and
language that's never been there before.
Megan Fritts: The difference between being a native speaker
of a language and being someone who's learned a language, I
think is is the perfect example of what we are risking, when we
use generative AI for our writing and, speaking, that we
risk going from this kind of native speaker status to a a a
situation where we have to if we want to have these skills at
all, we have to reteach it to ourselves in a in a really
artificial way.
Jason Oberholtzer: So is the concern there almost like what
happens in its absence? Or like it's like what happens if you're
without your Spanish English dictionary as it were Yeah. That
you'd actually don't have control over the language.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. It it feels like if we outsource for
example, you didn't do the reading for your college class,
but you have to write paper about it and you're just like,
shitty, this paper about this thing. You didn't engage with
the text. Yeah. You didn't transmit the text into writing.
And so like, you're probably not even remember what that class
was about. Yeah. You're losing some type of critical like brain
step that helps you metabolize information. Does that make
sense? Like, I think writing helps you metabolize
information.
And like, if I could just be candid, I think writing is kind
of mentally painful for me.
Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, yeah. That's the whole thing about
writing.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Like It
Jason Oberholtzer: hurts and it's bad.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: It hurts and it's bad, and that's the
whole point. And I will write something and I'll walk away and
I come I will come back three days later, And I'm just like,
oh, this psychologically hurts. But then you get into a groove
and then it feels good and you've kind of metabolized your
thoughts and it comes out and it feels great. And there's just
such an emotional experience in that. And so when you're just
like, hey chat, GBT, write this podcast episode, summarize the
notes from this interview I have with the source, or write the
interview questions.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: You're kind of losing some threads.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. You know, not to be the person who's
constantly defending cheating here. But when you brought up
writing the report in the book you have not read, that is
something I believe a It's lot of us have a classic move. You
have to try it at some point. And when you do that, you
marshal enough information about the book, you skim it, you look
up some notes, you try to find as much as you can to walk in
there.
But the thing you're doing when you walk in there is like using
your brain. It is learning. It is performing. It is something
that requires you to undergo a process that will help you be a
better thinker and communicator in the future because you are
actually doing a task. And to me, what feels scary about this
is that it is removing the mental load of doing the task.
Mhmm. Not so much cheating like the information, which is like
the veneer around which we all do the process of learning, but
it's removing the actual mental task, which is the point of
sitting down and being a part of a university or a class or
whatever the case may be. So I feel like this has to feel
different for teachers. Like, they've walked into campuses
every fall for millennia and been like, alright, everyone's
cheating. How do I make sure that I know that they are smart
enough to continue down the road after they continue cheating?
Like, I I that's probably unlikely that people believe
they have a complete fail proof method to stop all cheating
forever. Do you think that professor Fritz or other
professors are feeling like this is a different kind of stop
cheating move they need to make?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. So professor Fritz has kind of gone
nuclear. Okay. She instated a policy in her classroom that is
just like, I am banning all AI from my classroom. Okay.
It includes ChatGPT. It even includes like Grammarly, which I
use Grammarly to like make sure that my emails aren't misspelled
or whatever.
Mike Rugnetta: Oh, interesting. Not even
Tori Dominguez-Peak: too many exclamation points. She's like,
nope, not even that. Because Grammarly can suggest rewrites.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And that in itself is kind of generative AI.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And so I asked her like, okay, so how are
you enforcing this?
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: It just seems like a lot of work to
enforce this. And she has a very interesting way of going about
this. So at some point earlier in the semester, she has them
write these short essay type assignments in class. They are
handwritten, and they turn it into her right there, hard copy.
And so it's zero chance of AI use.
She had you write with a pen and paper. Yeah. And she keeps these
essays as kind of evidence of like, this is how these people
write. Oh. This is what your voice, your narrative voice is
like.
And so then later on in the semester, you turn in something
electronically and it's got AI written stuff, she's gonna be
like, this doesn't sound like you.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. Does she do the comparison process
herself or does she let AI do the comparisons?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So she kinda does both. Interesting.
She does use eight different AI detection programs that she runs
it through, which is Wow. It's a lot.
Jason Oberholtzer: Does the school pay for these?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: I don't know. That's great question.
Don't seem cheap, do they?
Jason Oberholtzer: No. I would imagine not.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And so that she runs it through all of
those. She also just looks at it herself and is like, yeah, I
could tell.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Of course. Right? Like, teachers
have been seeing this, like, forever.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: But I did ask, like, can you just tell off
the bat of a student's writing as AI generated just by looking
at their paper? And she said, yes. And that there's usually a
couple of clues.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. Is this where you're coming from my Em
dashes? Yeah. Alright. I'll listen to it at least.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: The first clue is she calls them 50¢
words. Weird, like formal words that the typical 18 year old
undergrad would just not be using. Okay.
Megan Fritts: An example of that is like the word want, w o n t,
where so you might use it in a sentence like, I want to take a
walk in the morning. So it's like talking like an
inclination. That's a 50¢ word that I I I would say most of my
students probably aren't just casually using in their
reflection writings.
Jason Oberholtzer: Now you're coming from my vocabulary.
First, my em dashes.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Are you want to use wants?
Jason Oberholtzer: I mean, of course, I am. But like, where in
an academic setting would I ever run across the need to express
my feelings through the word want?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. Exactly. Clue number two, and
you were pretty right about this, was Em dashes. Yeah. It's
not just any Em dash because I I I feel you, like, it sucks that
em dashes have become like this weird red flag and it's like, I
like a good em dash.
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: She said that there's a type of em dash
that is a red flag to her.
Megan Fritts: An acquaintance of mine, another philosophy
professor, he calls those epiphany dashes, where you go
from an ordinary, you know, thought like it's not just a
walk em dash, it's a brainstorming session. This is,
you know, you're having an epiphany.
Jason Oberholtzer: Interesting. Yeah. So there's like an emotive
component to the Emdash when it's used this way.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Some some sense it sounds like a LinkedIn
post. You know what I mean? Like, has that type type of
cadence for it.
Jason Oberholtzer: Right. It's like It's sort of a it's like
copywriting usage not Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's super
interesting.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And then obviously, the third main clue
is like she runs it through one of her software programs and
it's like, bing, AI generated. But yeah, mean, it's kind of an
intensive process.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. It sounds exhausting. I guess for
everyone, I suppose. Like, are the students having a good time
while this is happening?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: They don't seem to be big fans.
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: As you can imagine, a lot of them have
reacted by saying, well, I don't get why you've banned it because
my other professors and other classes don't care. So like, why
should it matter?
Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, jeez. Alright. Well, at least they're
still learning something and that something is emotional
manipulation.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. I guess they gotta learn to read
the syllabus.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: But it does kind of bring up something which
is that, okay, some professors don't care. Professor Fritz very
much does. Yeah. And so college students are kind of navigating
this landscape where it's like in the same semester, they might
have someone who's a real stickler about this stuff. And
they may also have a different teacher who doesn't care.
And it seems like they have to navigate all these individual AI
policies.
Jason Oberholtzer: Or just not use AI? That's one way to
navigate all of them.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Or just not use it at all. But I asked Fritz
about this like, oh, do you talk with other professors about
handling this? And she said that she actually sits on a couple of
AI related committees at her university.
Megan Fritts: I think instructor uniformity and solidarity on
this issue is pretty important for our students. I thought it
was a good idea, I was excited to to to try to make this
policy. But what ended up happening is that people just
had such different views on AI use in higher education that it
kind of just turned into debate every every meeting, and we we
have not yet made any kind of a policy.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. Well, I suppose that's predictable. It's
academia. It's meetings. It's consensus.
That is not necessarily easy to do, but, like, you know, I'm not
gonna tip my hand on where I stand on this. I'm sure everyone
is in deep mystery here. But like, if it's working for
professor Fritz, like, just let her do her thing. It seems like
it works.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. I mean, she thinks that she feels
that her system works well for her. Yeah. But her way of doing
things relies on knowing what these students write like, and
knowing what they don't write like, and they're writing as a
sort of fingerprint. But what happens when you can't really
tell and you have to do some detective work?
Jason Oberholtzer: Mhmm.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So I found a detective.
Jason Oberholtzer: Alright, listeners. This is the most
podcast break we will ever do after these messages, a
detective.
Rui Sousa-Silva: Even though we learn the same languages from
the same books and we learn we can find the same words in the
same dictionaries, the way each one of us uses language is
different. So we have a let's call it a different style of
using language.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So this is doctor Rui Sosasilva. He's from
Portugal. His whole training and job is as a forensic linguist.
Oh. So like, literally, his field is all about confirming
the identity of who wrote what.
Jason Oberholtzer: Woah. That's a rad job.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: I know. It's such a cool job. And I
literally didn't even know this job existed until I started
writing this episode. And I was like, this is amazing. Wow.
And being able to identify the nuances of what someone sounds
like, that identity is called an idiolect.
Rui Sousa-Silva: So ideolect is your own way of speaking or
writing the language. So it's as if your DNA was related to the
way you use language.
Jason Oberholtzer: I believe it.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So I mean, like, legally, criminally,
historically, a forensic linguist is the person you call
to match the fingerprints of someone's writing. Right?
Jason Oberholtzer: Woah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And so at the same time, he's also a
lecturer. He also teaches, which means that he also has to deal
with the issue of students using AI in his class. Really also has
students write in his class sit down and write. I know you're
not using AI because I can look at you writing. Right?
But when they do that, he's noticing something different
than Professor Fritz.
Rui Sousa-Silva: What we see nowadays, people interact with
generative AI so much that people are starting to write
like machines. With some of my students, I know that they are
sitting an exam and I know they were the ones who wrote the text
and still when I read the text it sounds as if it was generated
by a machine. And that's because we accommodate with other people
and we accommodate in the same way with the machines we
interact with. So we tend to accommodate so much to the
machine that we learn so much from the machine that we start
start writing like machines. So this is a challenge at the
moment.
Jason Oberholtzer: So is he saying that because we're
ingesting so much writing that has been made in this process
that we are starting to regurgitate Yeah. That Yeah.
That checks out.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: That's wild though, isn't it? Yeah. Because
then it makes me think about professor Fritz's class and her
methods, like, what if people just start writing like
ChatchyPT?
Jason Oberholtzer: Oh, boy.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Then at some point, it's just gonna get
harder to tell.
Jason Oberholtzer: Alright. You've made an un virtuous cycle
here. I see what has happened.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: You see what has happened. Yeah. And so
because Rui is a forensic linguist, like he is the person
you can tell who wrote what, I was like, can you please give me
an example of influencing the way of like how machines
influence the way people write. And he said that when you speak
to ChatGPT in Portuguese, because he lives in Portugal, it
will sometimes reply using a Brazilian Portuguese dialect,
and that has consequences.
Rui Sousa-Silva: Yeah. One example is the way when when
you're writing in English, you usually say, if you want to to
list a set of points, you'll say, firstly, such and such.
Secondly, such and such. And in Portuguese, usually you wouldn't
use the literal pronunciation of the adverb. But people are now
doing that and that's because interestingly Brazilian
Portuguese does that and because when you look at language
variants, I mean in Portugal you've got about 10,000,000
speakers, if you go to Brazil there are 200,000,000, so for
generative AI engines they feed on languages.
So they they are more likely to feed on Brazilian Portuguese
Tori Dominguez-Peak: than There's just more Brazilian
Portuguese language data out And so when Chateapiti speaks
Portuguese, it sounds Brazilian.
Rui Sousa-Silva: It's usually Brazilian Portuguese, even
though nowadays you can ask to write in European Portuguese but
every now and then there is a word in Brazilian Portuguese for
example. So the fact that it was based on Brazilian Portuguese
and the fact that Brazilian Portuguese uses that literal
translation of firstly, secondly, thirdly, now people
are writing like that.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Oh, that's so interesting.
Rui Sousa-Silva: Even native speakers of European Portuguese
are writing like that at the moment.
Jason Oberholtzer: Wow. As I'm hearing that, I'm just thinking
that that is not necessarily the canary in the coal mine, but
there's probably some better metaphor for it just being the
visible object of something that is also happening under the
layer of language and thinking. If we are regurgitating
different cultural grammar rules, we're probably also
surfacing other imports that we don't know are imported from
different places.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. I mean, Brazilian adverbs are
pretty low stakes. I mean, I think it's kind of amusing. But
remember when I said that forensic linguists identify the
DNA of language.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And they do that in criminal settings. Can I
outline a scary scenario for you, Jason?
Jason Oberholtzer: I'm braced. I'm ready.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Okay. So doctor Sosasilva told me that
one of the things that his colleagues talk about all the
time is the use of AI in criminal activity. So like using
generative AI to impersonate someone's writing style to write
something incriminating.
Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So for example, somebody does not like
you. And so they write a strongly worded threat to a
politician, but they write it Jason Operholzer style. And they
like, maybe they make a sock puppet social media account and
they impersonate you, and they post it on there. And you get a
visit from the police, and they're like, you wrote this.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: How do you prove that you didn't?
Jason Oberholtzer: That's a good question. I would probably at
this point, try to point to like the corpus of available writing
that I would have on hand. Like, I'm trying to really take a
cynical view of this and just assume that the the
infrastructure is weighted against me on this one, and
there's now a letter out there signed by me that says, hey,
buddy, I'm gonna kill you. And to disprove this, I don't think
I would have successful time attacking the language on a word
by word basis. I would probably have to compile my own corpus of
writing, and I'd probably have to divulge repositories of data
that I would otherwise want to keep secret, like private
messages and be like, I will take all of my eye messages and
put them in a model.
And you can see the way that I communicate and you can see like
all the communication I have had, all the cynicism I have had
around politicians and the government. And you tell me
where in this trajectory is there the leap to a murderer.
And it is less about word choice and more about state of mental
well-being. Like, is this the and then I'm going to write a
politician and murder them trajectory? And here's every
piece of written correspondence I have available to you.
And just hope that I've got a doctor like the good Portuguese
doctor doctor Sosa Silva on my side who can help me make a
better argument about that material than whoever's on the
other side.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. I mean, definitely, you would like
to call doctor Sosa Silva. Right?
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: They can analyze the text. They're like,
this is this isn't quite reek of Jason. There's something just a
little bit off of this.
Jason Oberholtzer: Speaking of word choice, can we do better
than reek of Jason?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Reek of Jason.
Jason Oberholtzer: For want of a better term, I suppose you can
keep reek.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: So, yeah, this is where forensic linguist
come in and then you don't get arrested, hopefully. Right?
Okay. But as generative AI gets more sophisticated, Rui thinks
that his work is going to get harder.
Rui Sousa-Silva: The developments in generative AI
will make it more complicated for forensic linguists to
attribute texts, which in turn will mean that forensic
linguists will need to do more research and to further their
research and to have more fine grained methods of attributing
authorship. But there will always be a distinction between
the way humans produce text and the way machines generate texts.
So things generative AI will evolve, forensic linguistics
will evolve, but eventually we will always be able to pinpoint
differences between the texts.
Jason Oberholtzer: So very similarly to the classroom here,
this seems like it is just creating piles of work for
everybody.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. It seems like things are just gonna
get harder for everyone, which is kind of a bummer. And I know,
like, the threatening the politician, like, that's a very
dramatic example, obviously. But like you said, with the
classroom, the idea I keep coming back to is cognitive
offloading and like, not doing all these mental processes and
offloading it to AI, which then I guess makes it harder for
forensically. Like, there's been studies from Microsoft, from the
SBS, Swiss Business School about how people who use generative AI
regularly tend to score lower on markers of critical thinking.
Like, there's actual data we have now. Mhmm. Again, I'm
painting kind of a scary picture to you. It's like, okay, so our
critical thinking may be getting compromised by a technology that
is also getting more sophisticated at pretending to
be us. And we're also starting to become influenced by the way
it writes.
Mhmm. Like, that's just such a weird trifecta.
Jason Oberholtzer: Right. But doesn't the cycle also work in
the other direction? Like, we are the corpus of information
that the generative models need to continue their work. And as
we lose cognitive function because of offloading, the
material that we are able to feed depreciates in value as
well, which one imagines leads to worse outputs from machines,
which we are synthesizing and further inhibits our ability to
think and provide a reasonable corpus of information updated to
the moment from which Yeah. The models can select.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: It's kind of like this feedback loop.
Yeah. Us feeding it and then it influencing us, and then all of
a sudden, we're just all speaking Brazilian Portuguese,
right?
Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And getting accused of crimes we didn't
commit. And professor Fritz's concern about the feedback loop
is that it affects everyone differently.
Megan Fritts: A lot of people defend, letting students use AI
in their work, by saying that they see it as a tool for
equity. Maybe for students who, had a less privileged primary
education or students for whom English is a second language, I
would contend the exact opposite is true. That what this is doing
is setting the stage for genuine reading and writing skills
becoming something that is really only accessible to the
elite class, those with a lot of money and leisure time to
cultivate them intentionally. And so that's really something
that concerns me quite a bit.
Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. I'm beginning to see why there's
such difficulty forming consensus around this. I mean,
initially, I'll be honest, my reaction was yeah. It's obvious
that in a space where you're supposed to be practicing
thinking and metastasizing your own thoughts that AI is just not
helpful. It's not there for any reason except for you to finish
the paper, which is a representation of the thoughts
you were supposed to be having, and it is like the wrong
takeaway from what you're doing in the classroom.
But now that they're applying these frameworks around
accessibility, I can see it becoming a little more
complicated. I guess a lot of it boils down to how much you think
the role of the academy is to prepare you for work,
employment, and how much it is to help you engage with how you
think and learn. But I'm beginning to see why the stakes
are a little more complicated than perhaps they feel at first
blush.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. And then when you think about
professor Fritz's role in the committees and how it's just
really hard to come to agreement or make any sort of policy, I
think this is something that they're gonna continue to
wrestle with for a long time.
Megan Fritts: As for myself, my policy won't be changing. And
that's, you know, that's about all I can do about that.
Jason Oberholtzer: Tori, thank you as always for bringing in a
really insightful piece here.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Yeah. Thanks so much for letting me
talk about it.
Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: And I just wanted to shout out thanks to
professor Fritz and to doctor Sosa Silva.
Jason Oberholtzer: At least one of whom is probably going to be
getting me out of jail over the next couple years. So pre thank
you for that one.
Tori Dominguez-Peak: Pre thank you for that one.
Jason Oberholtzer: Tori, where can folks find you and all of
the writing that definitively comes from your own brain on the
web?
Tori Dominguez-Peak: You can find me at toori d p nine
8.bluesky.social. And you can also find my podcast about video
games that I make of my own brain and play with my own brain
at press-startpod.bluesky.social.
Jason Oberholtzer: Tuesday, September 23, 10:30AM.
Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, October 8. We
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Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host,
that's me, is Mike Rugnetta. And then this warning flashes on the
light meter. Inside the house, a pilot light is always burning in
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In distant coasts, heavy and light petroleum is piped across
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