Picture a Lakeside junior sitting at their desk at 11 at night, working on their final paper for AmStud or U.S. History. Their paper, a project on the Pacific Theater in World War II, is one they know the thesis and subject of by heart, having prepared notes for a Harkness discussion on it just two days ago. They remember sharing ideas they truly believed in and feeling the unique satisfaction of having made an argument formed through an hour of debate and discussion. As they stare at their blank Google Document with a rubric and set of prompts pasted in, they remember their second meeting with their college counselor is tomorrow, and that this essay grade will feed their GPA and thus the college list they’re building for next year. The junior opens ChatGPT, pastes in a prompt, and less than five minutes later, they have a complete paper. While many would say they’re simply lazy cheaters, I argue that they are rational actors. In fact, society has built the conditions that made doing so rational.
Now, picture a different Lakeside junior. Well — two of them, Paul and Bill, sitting at a desk at 3 in the afternoon, staring at a blank piece of paper on their desk, trying valiantly to rewrite a broken program. In 1968, a group of mothers at this school held a rummage sale and spent the proceeds, around $3,000, on a Teletype terminal wired to a General Electric mainframe. The system, which allowed people to input a series of instructions that were relayed to an off-site computer, would go on to be instrumental in inspiring Lakeside’s most famous legacy: Microsoft. Not that Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Kent Evans, or Ric Weiland knew any of that, though. For a while, they simply experimented with it, tinkered with it, and put their tiny, grimy teenage hands all over a state-of-the-art technology that had only just been released to offices and research labs across the nation. And yet, in all its glory, the machine simply sat in a room alone; it had no rubric attached to it, nor was it part of any curriculum. And yet, those four students found it anyway, and they stayed until the school’s janitors kicked them out, only for them to come back the next morning … and the morning after that … and the morning … you get the point. Thus, the question arises, “what motivated them?” They were doing that because it was, by every account, outrageously fun, and because nothing at Lakeside in 1968 told them they needed any better reason than that.
That story is so crucial to our mission that the Pigott Family Arts Center houses what students call the “Bill Gates Shrine.” The story of how Paul, Bill, Kent, and Ric founded the Lakeside Programmer’s Group, and their journey to founding Microsoft, is invoked at every convocation and repeated whenever Lakeside is mentioned beyond its hallowed grounds. But what no one says about the story is that, no matter how hard we tried, we could never replicate those conditions today. Certainly not here, and not in any of the “high-performing” schools that were part of the sample subset of the Authentic Connections survey. The culture we’ve built since 1968 has a very, very, big problem, and even if many aspects of our society will continue to change, that problem will undoubtedly continue to exist. As a society that claims to support meritocracy, we have failed in protecting a sense of purposeless curiosity, and instead, we have treated it as a nuisance in our planners and a problem in our schedules. Every hour students spend on an assignment, extracurricular, sport, hobby, or craft demands a rigorous justification of how it will benefit us in the short term and the long run. “Because it’s fun” stopped being a sufficient answer around the same time Legally Blonde, in all its Crimson glory, was released.
“Fun.” I want to use that word directly and without apology, because we’ve frankly become embarrassed by it. It is not immaturity, nor is it the enemy of rigor, and it is most certainly not something that only toddlers can have. I do not define fun as a “motivation” to do something, nor a “genuine curiosity to pursue a subject,” because frankly, fun is simply the feeling of doing something for its own sake. There is a term in psychology called “intrinsic motivation.” It’s the idea that you’re doing something because the activity itself is worth doing as opposed to what it would get you. A psychology paper published jointly by Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and Reed College in 2000 demonstrated that if a reward is tied to an activity, then the individual loses all intrinsic motivation to pursue it. Children given gold stars for drawing pictures they’d previously drawn for free now stop drawing for free. The gold star functions as a quiet and permanent message that nothing about the drawing was the point, and instead, the star was.
What distinguishes the story of the Teletype and the story of the Lakesider who coded yet another AI model is that, nine times out of ten, the motivation driving the second student was extrinsic reward. Fun is the state of being so absorbed in something that the outcome stops mattering; furthermore, it’s where you lose track of time doing an activity because of how engrossing and thrilling it is. That state of mind is the state that every great Lakeside teacher is doing their absolute best to create in the classroom. And, it is precisely the same state that our school, both in its environment and its reputation, has made harder and harder to reach.
Now look at the landscape a meritocratic “American Dream” has built for us. A GPA that indicates a class rank, a math and science track ordered into a hierarchy with winners and losers at every level, widespread student success in a multitude of prestigious academic competitions, and stellar standardized test scores. Each one is a credential that an employer, admissions officer, administrator, or college counselor will notice, and therefore, must matter to students. The very architecture of this campus is named after its output, and every one of the things I just mentioned is a gold star. And every gold star delivers the same message to the student receiving it: that drawing isn’t the point. This is the world AI arrived into, a world of students carefully trained over the years to ask one question before beginning anything. “Is this worth my time?” Meaning, specifically, will it produce something measurable? And if the answer was no, investing in the activity must be irrational. If yes, then the goal was the output, not the understanding, and most certainly not the slow pleasure of getting somewhere from nowhere. The only thing that mattered was the thing you could hand in and then forget about. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other generative AI tool, for that matter, didn’t teach anyone to think this way. The epidemic use of artificial intelligence to “cheat” on our work is only because we students first learned to use chatbots with a perfectly sound and logical conclusion already formed: If the assignments and activities we do are only about their products, then why bother struggling to make the product yourself?
Return to the junior we envisioned in the beginning. While ChatGPT is doing a few minutes of its “deep research,” the student opens up TikTok on their phone. Social media is supposed to be something that belongs entirely to students, a source of entertainment to use in our free time. But when you open TikTok, Instagram, or any other social media platform, what you’re watching is not people doing things for fun. You watch a monetizing operation. Whether it’s a travel montage of places that exist only in the cloud storage of Sora, or an AI-generated cartoon of creepily humanoid cats jumping on a bed, each reel is optimized for the algorithm and promptly monetized. The people behind these accounts came to the exact same conclusion that students have been trained to reach, and that is to minimize input, maximize output, prioritize the product over the process, and the credential over the experience. Both found that their platforms didn’t reward genuine curiosity or effort, but they rewarded the appearance thereof, formatted correctly.
We have gone from having fun embarrassing ourselves in public or messing something up on purpose to see what happens, to a culture that demands we produce, optimize and perform our way through life. Gone are the days of staying up late trying to solve something because we simply want to, and replacing them are students staying up until 3 in the morning watching Ivy League admissions reaction videos. The result is a generation that scrolls for hours through artificial and desensitizing content to get a tiny hit of dopamine, and a generation that still finishes scrolling feeling worse off than when they started. A generation that has forgotten what wanting to create something actually feels like. AI, in effect, goes full circle in completing the horrible cycle that entraps us, one that began the moment we decided the only experiences worth having are the ones that produce an “ivy league: my stats” post on the A2C (Applying To College) Reddit sub.
The system we live in asks students for products, and AI makes the products more quickly, in higher quality than the students. AI checks all the boxes for satisfactory results: students can turn in a polished assignment on time to receive a 4.0, the number that Instagram “college consultants” selling lists of summer programs for $50 constantly harp on about. And as participants in a culture that made these actions logical in the first place, can we blame them?
An AI language model looks over thousands of essays, amalgamates a slop of words and ideas from hundreds of other writers, and then its essay arrives clean and finished to your virtual “desk,” indistinguishable and often better in quality than the writing of someone who actually wrote. Better in quality than the student who fought through a bad first paragraph and a worse second one, only to finally say something that rings true on the third try, who gets something that will never go on a transcript or Canvas comment: a thought that is truly and purely theirs. To the junior, sophomore, senior, or freshman sitting at that desk right now, I have something to say to you. Using AI to write your essays is ripping away the one thing that you have any control over as an adolescent — your thought. Writing, or mathematics, or science, or any other discipline, isn’t a task you hand to a machine to end up with a complete deliverable. When you write –– when you actually write, pushing a half-formed idea through the resistance of language until it becomes a sentence that says exactly what you mean –– that idea surprises you. It sharpens you as you discover in the second paragraph that what you said in the first one was almost right but not quite. When you go back to revise that first paragraph, the revision is, in itself, a form of thinking that couldn’t have happened any other way.
To the junior from the beginning, the reason you typed in a query to your favorite chatbot is not because you are weak or dishonest. It’s because everyone in your playing field is already using AI to quickly finish their tasks so they can do another extracurricular, or study for another competition or exam, to maximize the same 24 hours that you have per day. The reason you still turn to a tool that takes away your ability to think is because no one in the arena around you, with a scarce few exceptions, is also using that exact tool, motivated because they haven’t ever been asked to do something purely because it’s fun or interesting, or thought-provoking. The system took that away from you early, gold star by gold star, grade by grade. It’s no wonder you’re using a machine to provide what a different machine asked for.
Our school’s mission statement says we are an institution that will “develop creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits.” Thankfully, it does not say to “produce competitive credentials that will in the future pay back to the school.” The gap between those two ideas is where every student here hovers, and somewhere in the middle, a student who once found something genuinely fascinating has spent the last several years learning to thoroughly distrust that feeling.
We can keep asking ourselves how to improve our school curriculum or fix the tools we use to detect AI. We could upgrade our software or institute a stricter honor code. Or, we could ask the harder questions. What would it take to give students back the experience of doing something for no reason?
What I would give to return to the way it was in 1968, in a room with a Teletype machine, no gold stars, and some eager, fun-loving kids with nowhere else they’d rather be.
