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Opinion: The college essay is not dead

In a guest column today, Matthew Boedy , an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia , discusses the development of artificial intelligence programs that can spit out accurate and fluid essays in response to any prompt.

Boedy is responding to a column in the Atlantic by English teacher Daniel Herman who writes of the new OpenAI’s ChatGPT program that “may signal the end of writing assignments altogether — and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill...But most jaw-dropping of all, on a personal level: It made quick work out of an assignment I’ve always considered absolutely ‘unhackable.’ ”

In another Atlantic essay on sophisticated generative AI, novelist and essayist Stephen Marche writes: “Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it.”

Here is Boedy’s take on whether AI programs endanger writing and writing instruction.

By Matthew Boedy

It’s that time of year when I read reflections by my students in my first year writing course. This course is part of a mandated two-semester program and is populated by many dual enrolled students.

By and large, they praise the class and my teaching. Though I suspect at times some are merely buttering me up for a better grade. But I also ask them to reflect on how my ways with reading and writing compares to their high school experiences.

Credit: Peggy Cozart

The overwhelming claim by these “cream of the crop” students about their high school experience is twofold. First, they are often assigned little to no writing beyond one to two pages. Second, the mechanical or formulaic teaching of writing they received often meant they learned nothing of consequence.

I can’t vouch for the complete veracity of those claims. But I bring this up because of two paired headlines racing across the parts of the internet recently where teachers like me meet: “The End of high school English” and its companion, “The College Essay Is Dead.”

On the website of the Atlantic, both muse about the impact of a new technology called ChatGPT which is an artificial intelligence software that can create essays that sound as good or better than the run-of-the-mill ones I read on a regular basis from students.

The basic claim of mortality here is that this software is the greatest plagiarism program of all time. And people like me still assigning essays will only get from this point on prose produced by a robotic output of what people in the AI business call language production algorithms. I won’t bore you with examples but basically not only can you ask the algorithm to write an essay on any topic but also in the style of any famous author. As if sounding like Hemingway gets you extra points.

Let me dispel any notion that the college essay is dead or that this new technology will end my career as a writing teacher.

Contrary to popular belief, we writing teachers believe more in the process of writing than the product. If we have done our jobs well and students have learned, reading that final draft during this time of year is often a formality. The process tells us the product will be amazing.

Writing is a process of learning not merely about a subject. It’s also a learning about how that subject can best be framed for an audience. It’s also a writer learning about themselves. What do they want to say? What do they want to sound like? What rhetorical tools best fit their own skill set?

Asking an algorithm to make you sound like Hemingway actually will raise the reddest of red flags for me for plagiarism because the paper doesn’t sound like a first-year student.

On that note, if we writing teachers are doing our job well, we are crafting assignments that simply can’t be plagiarized. That is, an essay for my assignments can’t be bought off the internet or created by an algorithm. For example, I ask students to write an essay about three to five pictures of their own choosing. Sure, students can and do select pictures from the internet. But many don’t, instead using pictures from their phone. And coming up with things to say thematically about those pictures can’t be done by an algorithm. Another assignment is a research essay where I give students two sources and they have to find two others. The plagiarism I find most now is students stealing from the examples I show from previous semesters or other students in the class when they post early drafts to a class discussion board.

But for the writing-to-learn process to work, students also have to do their jobs. They have to be willing to fail, to write badly, or simply admit they don’t know what to say. And that is extremely hard if indeed they have never been asked to fill a blank page with little to no guidance from the teacher. To think as they write, not already have thought and then write.

And yes, that initial failure does bring the temptation to cheat. But what I hear from students in these end-of-semester reflections is not the siren song of plagiarism but a fear of failure. Because many of these students have never failed.

And for the other students who all they have known is failure with writing, this process only reinforces that sense of dread.

The answer to that is not an algorithm but advice. It’s why I have conferences with my students roughly every two weeks.

This new technology may indeed be the end of high school English. A certain kind of high school English. And a certain kind of college essay.

But it isn’t the death of the kind of education you should expect from our state’s higher education institutions. It’s the opportunity to show why we need more faculty, not less. Why we need less students per class, not more.

The cost of college has exploded due to one sizable factor – the death of public support. Lawmakers think tuition is the burden students should pay to have skin in the game.

But we all as a collective have skin in this particular composition game because good writing is that key fundamental civic skill, one we so desperately need more of. And it must be and should only be taught by those who see it as learning, not keyboard strokes after learning.

Even the algorithm agrees. I asked ChatGPT “What is the best way to teach writing?” I don’t have space to share its whole answer. But it suggests “clear and detailed feedback,” helping “students develop their own writing process” through revision practice, and working to “encourage creativity and originality in students’ writing.”

Maybe though it is just telling me what I want to hear. Like some of my students.

About the Author

Maureen Downey has written editorials and opinion pieces about local, state and federal education policy since the 1990s.

Credit: TNS

Credit: Jason Getz / [email protected]

The English Major, After the End

By  Andrew Newman

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Warner Bros. Discovery

Last week, The New Yorker published “ The End of the English Major ,” by Nathan Heller. English faculty members took to Twitter to push back on virtually every point in the essay. English B.A.s responded in droves to the poet Jorie Graham’s call to declare #IWasAnEnglishMajor , recounting how their undergraduate training led to remarkable careers.

But Heller is one of many to spot the four horsemen—call them defunding, recession, self-sabotage and artificial intelligence—on the humanities’ horizon. The last two horsemen may ride in tandem: last December, in The Atlantic , in “ The College Essay is Dead ,” Stephen Marche chastised humanists for “committing soft suicide” by mostly ignoring technological change for decades.

Heller makes only parenthetical reference to institutions, like the University of California, Berkeley , that have seen rising enrollments in humanities. Yet the trend is undeniable—humanities enrollments have been declining for years, and there is no evidence of an overall rebound. So how might English adapt, belatedly, to end-times?

Forget about the Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt’s suggestion that English departments would do well to turn their attention to long-form television. In a mocumentary-like interview with Heller, Greenblatt—described as “one of the highest-ranking humanities professors by the stripes and badges of the trade”—toyed with Silly Putty while he counted off hit series: “ The Wire , Breaking Bad , Chernobyl —there are dozens of these now!’” To this list, he might have added HBO’s current hit: the postapocalyptic The Last of Us captures the current mood of English departments, which see one prospective student after another infected by the STEM and business bugs. So does Station Eleven , where a small group of remnants cling wishfully to Shakespeare. So does The Handmaid’s Tale , which depicts a nation afflicted by ideological conservatism and infertility. Aging English faculties, like the one depicted in Netflix’s The Chair , have the dismal sense that there is no next generation. My own department resembles a backgammon board in which every single piece has crossed the midpoint and several have started bearing off into retirement.

Yet reading critically—as English majors are trained to do—Heller’s assessment offers not only a basis for hope, but a forward-thinking vision for humanities departments and especially for English. Here, I want to lend more specificity to two familiar arguments for supporting humanities education, one philosophical and the other career-oriented. On the one hand, there is the traditional notion that the humanities cultivate empathetic, critical-thinking citizens (one of Heller’s interviewees, the Columbia University professor James Shapiro, claimed that the decline of the humanities tracks with the decline of democracy). On the other hand, advocates such as Humanities Works point out that employers, even or especially in STEM fields and business, value the sort of creative, adaptive, nuanced thinking and communication skills fostered by humanities.

As Heller suggests, the self-congratulatory belief in humanities education as “cultivation of the mind” has been largely faith-based: “This model describes one of those pursuits, like acupuncture or psychoanalysis, which seem to produce salutary effects through mechanisms that we have tried but basically failed to explain.” But Heller is wrong about acupuncture, if not psychoanalysis—there is scientific research into its mechanisms of action . Similarly, Heller is neglecting research into the interactions between literature and the human brain.

As the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf demonstrates in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World ( HarperCollins, 2018 ) literacy education, beginning in early childhood, involves the brain’s neuroplasticity. In a sense, the reading brain is a sort of artificial intelligence, because literacy, unlike language, is not innate. It doesn’t depend on existing “circuits”; it shapes new ones. Their most elaborate capacity is for the sort of deep reading occasioned by literature: characterized by contemplative, associative thought, empathetic connections and insights. She writes, “The expansive, encompassing processes that underlie insight and reflection in the present reading brain represent our best complement and antidote to the cognitive and emotional changes that are the sequelae of the multiple, life-enhancing achievements of a digital age.” In other words, as our absorption in digital media has affected our cognitive development, literature provides a necessary counterbalance.

For literature instructors at all levels, the science Wolf presents about the “reading brain” should be deeply validating: it’s an empirical basis for the miracle that we all implicitly believe in. And for citizens more broadly, this science exploring how digital technology affects the reading brain—our capacities for analytical and reflective thinking, for sustained attention (or “cognitive patience”), for empathy and perspective-taking—should be concerning. Literary study is important now precisely because the sort of cognition it fosters and sustains is so endangered. Even Shapiro, an extremely late smartphone adopter, admitted to Heller that “‘Technology in the last 20 years has changed all of us,’” including him. He used to read five novels a month; now he tries to fit in one. Similarly, Wolf tried a small experiment on herself, re-reading Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi , a favorite novel from her youth, and found that she could not sustain her attention. I’ve had the same experience. Like many English professors, I’m sure, I think back to a youth in which I read nearly constantly, and I’m pained to recognize that I’ve lost the stamina. Inspired by Wolf’s vision of the reading brain, I’m getting back to analog texts, and I feel like I’m slowly recovering the experience of deep reading, a practice that used to be second nature.

An implication of this neuroscience is that literature departments should keep doing what we do best. It’s not a question of whether literature is relevant: it’s relevant because of what we do with it and vice versa. Our chief contribution can’t be a by-product—“communication skills!”—that other programs of study develop more directly. Instead, by teaching literature, we’re fostering a way of thinking that is exciting and often arduous and that students can’t get anywhere else.

Especially not from artificial intelligence. As Heller writes, “ChatGPT can no more conceive Mrs. Dalloway than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork and compose basic code and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.”

“I think the future belongs to the humanities,” Sanjay Sarma, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Heller.

If that’s the case, then we need more English majors and minors and faculty (!) to help build that future. And we shouldn’t do so by dwelling on the past, but rather by engaging with the new media landscape, including AI, and demonstrating the fundamental role of literature within it.

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Is ChatGPT the end of trust? Will the college essay survive?

Hello and welcome to December’s special edition of Eye on A.I.

Is ChatGPT the end of trust? That’s what some people are suggesting after the release of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, which is shockingly good at mimicking human writing in almost any format, from computer code and poetry to blog posts and polemical essays. Much of what the chatbot spits out is factually accurate. But much of it isn’t. And the problem is that there is no easy way for a user to ensure that ChatGPT’s responses are accurate. ChatGPT expresses both fact and fiction with equal confidence and style.

Never mind that the written word has had trust issues since the very beginning of writing. (Ancient scribes were often propagandists and fabulists after all.) There does seem to be something different about the way ChatGPT can create fluent and confident answers to almost any question in less than a second—and right now since OpenAI isn’t charging for it, it does so at zero cost to the user. Before, creating a convincing fraud would take time and serious effort. But tools like ChatGPT mean that the marginal cost of creating misinformation has essentially dropped to zero. That means we are likely to see an explosion of it .

Some say we have already seen the first victim of this misinformation eruption: Stack Overflow, a site that provides community-sourced answers to people’s computer coding questions, had to bar users from submitting answers created by ChatGPT after being overwhelmed with responses created by the chatbot. The problem, Stack Overflow said, is that the answers seemed very convincing, but were actually wrong, and it was taking their community moderators too long to vet all the answers and discover the flaws.

Things are going to get a lot worse if one of the new advocates for open-sourcing A.I. models decides to build a ChatGPT clone and make it fully available for free as an open-source project. (Right now OpenAI still controls the model behind ChatGPT and users can only query the model through an interface that OpenAI could shut down, or impose charges to use, at any time. Its terms of use also bar people from using the bot to run misinformation campaigns.) Already Ehmad Mostaque, the former hedge fund manager who runs Stability AI, the company that helped train and open-source the popular text-to-image system Sable Diffusion, has asked his Twitter followers whether Stability should create an open source version of ChatGPT.

As part of its release of ChatGPT, OpenAI also released an A.I. system that can detect whether text was created using ChatGPT. The open-source A.I. startup Hugging Face hosts an interface to that ChatGPT detector on its website and, in experiments, Casey Fiesler, a professor of information science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said on Twitter that when she fed the detector five student-written essays and five created using ChatGPT, it flagged all five ChatGPT-made ones with 99.9% confidence. But some researchers say they doubt the detector will work on all future versions of the A.I. system, or will work for any similar, but not identical, large language models that others train. Earlier research on large language models had found that A.I. systems were poor at differentiating between A.I.-created and human-written text.

One area where many people think ChatGPT and similar systems will have an immediate and profound effect is education. Many are saying such systems mean the end of using any kind of write-at-home essay or report for student assessments. It might mean the end of college application essays and term papers. The Atlantic had a very good piece examining this last week. I asked a friend of mine who is a university professor what he thought and he answered unequivocally that the term paper was finished. He said he thought professors will have to rely solely on proctored exams where students are asked to hand write their essays (or type on computers that they can prove are not attached to the Internet.)

Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, said at Fortune’ s Brainstorm A.I. conference in San Francisco last week that teachers who were wringing their hands about ChatGPT were making “a pedagogical mistake” in confusing the essay, which he said was simply “an artifact,” with the important information that the teacher is actually trying to ensure that the student has learned. He seemed to say that ChatGPT would no more destroy the teaching of humanities than the calculator had destroyed the teaching of mathematics. “In a sense, nothing really is changing here other than you have this tool, and the student themselves has to become the teacher to the model,” he said, meaning that the student will still have to go over the answer that the large language model produces and ensure that it is not making up information. The student, for now, would still have to provide accurate citations of where the information was coming from. “Your job is: be the editor for this thing, be the teacher, coax it into getting you the output that you really need. That’s the important thing, that’s the special thing about us. The thing is just a tool.”

Scott is not alone in the view that ChatGPT could actually be great for education. But I think Scott and others are missing something here. Teachers use essays for more than just assessing what facts a student has learned. That may be true in elementary school. But at the high school and, certainly at the university level, teachers use essays not simply to see what facts students know but if they can use those facts to make a well-reasoned argument. The facts are simply supporting evidence. They are necessary but not sufficient in order to get top marks. Teachers also use essays to assess how well the student is able to express their ideas in writing—how graceful his or her prose is, can the student come up with original and appropriate metaphors, etc.

Perhaps most importantly, it is difficult to separate the act of composition from the act of thinking—by writing a person is forced to structure their thoughts, refine their ideas, marshal evidence, and consider counter-arguments. There’s a lot of learning that takes place in the act of composition itself. Most of that disappears when ChatGPT or its successor bots can simply churn out page after page of well-written and well-structured prose and the student is reduced to being a mere fact-checker and annotator. We write not merely to convey information, but to conjure and refine it.

Read on for a few more A.I.-related stories from the past week. Fortune’ s newsletters, including Eye on A.I., are going on hiatus for the holidays. The next Eye on A.I. will be in your inboxes on Jan. 10. In the meantime, happy holidays and a happy new year to you all! See you in 2023.

Jeremy Kahn [email protected] @jeremyakahn

A.I. IN THE NEWS

Illustrators bemoan the ease with which A.I. tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are allowing anyone to create children’s books. Time magazine chronicles what happened after Ammaar Reshi created a children’s book without having to do any of the writing or illustrating himself and began selling the self-published book on Amazon. But artists protested that such technology was profiting off their own work since A.I. systems like GPT and Midjourney are trained on vast databases of existing human-created images and text. “The main problem to me about A.I. is that it was trained off of artists’ work,” Adriane Tsai, a children’s book illustrator, told Time . “It’s our creations, our distinct styles that we created, that we did not consent to being used.”

DeepMind’s code-writing A.I. AlphaCode called a ‘stunning’ advance. That’s according to Science magazine , which published a peer-reviewed version of DeepMind’s research on a coding bot that could compete successfully against human coders. (AlphaCode had initially been announced back in February.) AlphaCode can solve 34% of assigned coding problems, a performance that far exceeds a competing system called Codex that OpenAI debuted in 2021. In online coding competitions with at least 5,000 competitors, the system outperformed 45.7% of human programmers.

Alphabet employees worry the company is falling behind in the race to commercialize advanced A.I. technology. That’s according to a report in CNBC that said at a recent all-hands company meeting, employees questioned the company’s decision not to release its own powerful chatbot A.I., which is called LaMBDA, more widely in light of the surge in popularity around OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Right now, LaMBDA is only available to researchers inside Google and a handpicked group of others, with very limited public access through Google’s A.I. Test Kitchen. According to CNBC, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google’s A.I. division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities to OpenAI’s ChatGPT but that the cost if something goes wrong would be greater because people have to trust the answers they get from Google.

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The College Essay Is Dead - The Atlantic

Interesting article on the ways in which science and the humanities continue to diverge while also offering an interesting take on the possibilities of AI being able to fill in some literary "gaps" that may or may not have potential uses to the future of the field.

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The digital classroom, transforming the way we learn

Articles and "Free lesson plans on the go"

The End of High-School English and The College Essay Is Dead

Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform . . . . . . .

High school; The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing , plus an  upgrade  to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google  previewed  new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a  $1.5 billion valuation  in October. It still takes a little initiative for a kid to find a text generator, but not for long.

Academia ;  And now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems. Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated? Going by my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I figure it will take 10 years for academia to face this new reality: two years for the students to figure out the tech, three more years for the professors to recognize that students are using the tech, and then five years for university administrators to decide what, if anything, to do about it. Teachers are already some of the most overworked, underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with a humanities in crisis. And now this. I feel for them.

Two separate articles in The Atlantic with two different angles, covering the same topic, AI. I have quoted what I think are the highlights below. And I repeat this one; Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now—maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class—but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?”

High school

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written. By  Daniel Herman It goes further. Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI’s bots. “Can you fix this essay up and make it better?” Turns out, it could. It kept the student’s words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic. I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

Higher education

Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with the following opening paragraph: The construct of “learning styles” is problematic because it fails to account for the processes through which learning styles are shaped. Some students might develop a particular learning style because they have had particular experiences. Others might develop a particular learning style by trying to accommodate to a learning environment that was not well suited to their learning needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interactions among learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these shape how we learn and the kinds of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B+? And how would your grade change if you knew a human student hadn’t written it at all? Because Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references,  here .) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays. By  Stephen Marche

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The End of the College Essay

E verybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy , borrow , or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we’d have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC . And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign to compose their own essays, said exegetic masterpieces usually take them all of half an hour at 4 a.m. to write, and consist accordingly of “arguments” that are at best tangentially related to the coursework, font-manipulated to meet the minimum required page-count. Oh, “attitudes about cultures have changed over time”? I’m so glad you let me know.

Nobody hates writing papers as much as college instructors hate grading papers (and no, having a robot do it is not the answer). Students of the world: You think it wastes 45 minutes of your sexting time to pluck out three quotes from The Sun Also Rises , summarize the same four plot points 50 times until you hit Page 5, and then crap out a two-sentence conclusion? It wastes 15 hours of my time to mark up my students’ flaccid theses and non sequitur textual “evidence,” not to mention abuse of the comma that should be punishable by some sort of law—all so that you can take a cursory glance at the grade and then chuck the paper forever.

What’s more, if your average college-goer does manage to read through her professor’s comments, she will likely view them as a grievous insult to her entire person, abject proof of how this cruel, unfeeling instructor hates her . That sliver of the student population that actually reads comments and wants to discuss them? They’re kids whose papers are good to begin with, and often obsessed with their GPAs. I guarantee you that every professor you know has given an A to a B paper just to keep a grade-grubber off her junk. (Not talking to you, current students! You’re all magnificent, and going to be president someday. Please do not email me.)

When I was growing up, my mother—who, like me, was a “ contingent ” professor—would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more that sympathy dissipated: “If you hate grading papers so much,” I’d say, “there’s an easy solution for that.” My mother, not to be trifled with when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate), would snap: “It’s an English class . I can’t not assign papers .”

Mom, friends, educators, students: We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma : abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training , an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “ piece of paper .” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers . It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

Most students enter college barely able to string three sentences together—and they leave it that way, too. With protracted effort and a rhapsodically engaged instructor, some may learn to craft a clunky but competent essay somewhere along the way. But who cares? My fellow humanists insist valiantly that (among other more elevated reasons) writing humanities papers leads to the crafting of sharp argumentative skills, and thus a lifetime of success in a number of fields in which we have no relevant experience. But my friends who actually work in such fields assure me that most of their colleagues are borderline-illiterate. After all, Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook Friendster profile bragged “i don’t read” ( sic ), and look at him.

Of course it would be better for humanity if college in the United States actually required a semblance of adult writing competency. But I have tried everything . I held a workshop dedicated to avoiding vague introductions (“The idea and concept of the duality of sin and righteousness has been at the forefront of our understanding of important concepts since the beginning of time.”) The result was papers that started with two incoherent sentences that had nothing to do with each other. I tried removing the introduction and conclusion altogether, and asking for a three-paragraph miniessay with a specific argument—what I got read like One Direction fan fiction .

I’ve graded drafts and assigned rewrites, and that helps the good students get better, but the bad students, the ones I’m trying to help , just fail to turn in any drafts at all. Meanwhile, I come up for air and realize that with all this extra grading, I’m making 75 cents an hour.

I’m not calling for the end of all papers—just the end of papers in required courses. Some students actually like writing, and let those blessed young souls be English majors, and expound on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to their hearts’ content, and grow up to become writers, huzzah. But for the common good, leave everyone else out of it.  

Instead of essays, required humanities courses (which I support, for all the reasons William Cronon , Martha Nussbaum , and Paulo Freire give) should return to old-school, hardcore exams, written and oral . You cannot bullshit a line-ID. Nor can you get away with only having read one page of the book when your professor is staring you down with a serious question. And best of all, oral exams barely need grading: If you don’t know what you’re talking about, it is immediately and readily manifest (not to mention, it’s profoundly schadenfroh when a student has to look me in the face and admit he’s done no work).

Plus, replacing papers with rigorous, old-school, St. John’s -style tribulations also addresses an issue humanities-haters love to belabor: Paper-grading is so subjective , and paper-writing so easy to fake, that this gives the humanities their unfortunate reputation as imprecise , feelings-centered disciplines where there are “no right answers.” So let’s start requiring some right answers.

Sure, this quashes the shallow pretense of expecting undergraduates to engage in thoughtful analysis, but they have already proven that they will go to any lengths to avoid doing this. Call me a defeatist, but honestly I’d be happy if a plurality of American college students could discern even the skeletal plot of anything they were assigned. With more exams and no papers, they’ll at least have a shot at retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls “sympathetic imagination”—the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that unfolds when we’re touched by stories of people who are very much unlike us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them.

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Does AI mean the death of the college essay?

Unlike other forms of plagiarism, ai is much more difficult to detect— what does this mean for college essays.

By Hanna Seariac

Will artificial intelligence spell the end of the college essay?

Unlike other forms of plagiarism, AI is much more difficult to detect. According to The Atlantic , ChatGPT launched in 2020, but an updated version of it has become popular this week — with a user count of over one million.

The mechanism of the bot is simple. Type in a prompt about what you want the bot to say and then text will be typed on your screen by the bot. This can range from the humorous to the serious.

The bot is the latest in AI that has taken hold of the general public. While image AI has become popular (think DALL-E , Midjourney and the recently popular Lensa), writing AI has mostly flown under the radar. Now the ChatGPT bot is being used for memes and jokes. I asked the bot to “make jokes about hallmark movies” and it told me “Why do Hallmark movies always take place during the holidays? Because they’re too corny to be shown any other time of year.”

As fun as it is to prompt the bot to give text like this, some like Stephen Marche believe that it could mean the death of the college essay.

Writing for The Atlantic , Marche described students who have used AI to write essays. “They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t ‘somebody else’ — it’s a program.”

ChatGPT can produce whole essays on command.

For example, I put in the prompt “advanced essay on the history of The Great Gatsby” and within a short period of time, an entire essay surfaced on my screen.

The writing itself isn’t half-bad.

The bot began, “The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a novel that explores the decade and excess of the Roaring Twenties. ... The novel was published in 1925, a time when the United States was experiencing significant economic growth and cultural change. The country was in the midst of the “Jazz Age,” and the traditional values of the past were being challenged by the hedonism and materialism of the present.”

I tried again to see if quality writing as a feature, not just a bug. I prompted the AI bot to write a “college essay about whether or not God exists.”

The bot wrote, “Those who argue for the existence of God often point to the complexity and beauty of the natural world as evidence of a higher power. ... On the other hand, those who argue agains the existence of God may point to the lack of empirical evidence for a higher power.”

I wanted to see if the bot could handle more specific requests so I typed in “literary analysis about the color blue in the great gatsby.”

The bot wrote about how the color blue is associated with both Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. The bot added, “The blue of the East and West Eggs, the two sides of Long Island where the main characters live, represents the social and emotional divide between the characters. The blue of the water that separates the mainland from the island also serves as a barrier between the characters and their desires.”

On command, the bot will even provide citations.

Advances in AI might dramatically impact college. After all, if a bot can produce an essay that gets a student a passing grade and the essay is practically untraceable, then how will a professor detect plagiarism?

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How to End a College Admissions Essay | 4 Winning Strategies

Published on October 16, 2021 by Meredith Testa . Revised on May 31, 2023.

The ending of your college essay should leave your reader with a sense of closure and a strong final impression.

Table of contents

Endings to avoid, option 1: return to the beginning, option 2: look forward, option 3: reveal your main point, option 4: end on an action, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

A bad conclusion can bring your whole essay down, so make sure to avoid these common mistakes.

Summarizing

Unlike an academic essay, an admissions essay shouldn’t restate your points. Avoid ending with a summary; there’s no need to repeat what you’ve already written.

Phrases like “in conclusion,” “overall,” or “to sum it up” signal that you have nothing to add to what you’ve already written, so an admissions officer may stop reading.

Stating the obvious

Instead of stating the obvious, let your work speak for itself and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. If your essay details various times that you worked tirelessly to go above and beyond, don’t finish it by stating “I’m hardworking.” Admissions officers are smart enough to figure that out on their own.

You should also avoid talking about how you hope to be accepted. Admissions officers know you want to be accepted—that’s why you applied! It’s okay to connect what you discuss in the essay to your potential future career or college experience, but don’t beg for admission. Stay focused on your essay’s core topic.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Many successful essays follow a “sandwich,” or full-circle, structure , meaning that they start with some image or idea, veer away from it in the middle, and then return to it at the end.

This structure is clean, self-contained, and satisfying for readers, so it’s a great choice if it works with the topic you’ve chosen.

In the “sandwich” essay outlined below, a student discusses his passion for musical theater. Instead of simply stating that interest, his essay starts with a funny anecdote about a minor fire that erupted on set. At the end, it returns to this anecdote, creating a sense of closure.

• Intro: I may be the world’s worst firefighter.
• Flashback to working on the school musical
• Demonstrate my passion for theatre
• Detail the story of the theater set catching fire
• Show how I made the most of the situation
• Conclusion: I proved my value as a director, an actor, and a writer that week一even if I was a terrible firefighter.

Many successful essays end by looking forward to the future. These endings are generally hopeful and positive—always great qualities in an admissions essay—and often connect the student to the college or their academic goals.

Although these endings can be highly effective, it can be challenging to keep them from sounding cliché. Keep your ending specific to you, and don’t default to generalities, which can make your essay seem bland and unoriginal.

Below are a good and a bad example of how you could write a “looking forward” ending for the musical theater “firefighter” essay.

Sometimes, holding back your main point can be a good strategy. If your essay recounts several experiences, you could save your main message for the conclusion, only explaining what ties all the stories together at the very end.

When done well, this ending leaves the reader thinking about the main point you want them to take from your essay. It’s also a memorable structure that can stand out.

However, if you choose this approach, it can be challenging to keep the essay interesting enough that the reader pays attention throughout.

In the essay outlined below, a student gives us snapshots of her experience of gymnastics at different stages in her life. In the conclusion, she ties the stories together and shares the insight that they taught her about different aspects of her character and values.

• Passionate, excited
• Sister born that day—began to consider people beyond myself
• Realizing that no matter how much I love gymnastics, there are more important things
• I’d been working especially hard to qualify for that level
• It came after many setbacks and failures
• I had to give up time with friends, first homecoming dance of high school, and other activities, and I considered quitting
• Conclusion: I’m still all of those selves: the passionate 7-year-old, the caring 11-year-old, and the determined 15-year-old. Gymnastics has been a constant throughout my life, but beyond the balance beam, it has also shown me how to change and grow.

Ending on an action can be a strong way to wrap up your essay. That might mean including a literal action, dialogue, or continuation of the story.

These endings leave the reader wanting more rather than wishing the essay had ended sooner. They’re interesting and can help you avoid boring your reader.

Here’s an example of how this ending could work for the gymnastics essay.

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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There are a few strategies you can use for a memorable ending to your college essay :

• Return to the beginning with a “full circle” structure
• Reveal the main point or insight in your story
• Look to the future
• End on an action

The best technique will depend on your topic choice, essay outline, and writing style. You can write several endings using different techniques to see which works best.

Unlike a five-paragraph essay, your admissions essay should not end by summarizing the points you’ve already made. It’s better to be creative and aim for a strong final impression.

You should also avoid stating the obvious (for example, saying that you hope to be accepted).

There are no set rules for how to structure a college application essay , but these are two common structures that work:

• A montage structure, a series of vignettes with a common theme.
• A narrative structure, a single story that shows your personal growth or how you overcame a challenge.

Avoid the five-paragraph essay structure that you learned in high school.

When revising your college essay , first check for big-picture issues regarding message, flow, tone, style , and clarity. Then, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

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AI and the English Major

Three colby professors on why the study of english is more relevant in the face of new technology.

Did you “google” something today while wearing “athleisure”? Maybe you felt “FOMO” after being “ghosted” by someone. That would be a little “sus,” at least according to “Gen-Z.” 

Those are just a few examples of terms someone 20 years ago wouldn’t recognize. Just last year Merriam-Webster added 370 words to its online dictionary while the Oxford English Dictionary added a whopping 700. As society changes, so does our language to describe it.

There’s a new term floating around the Internet that you might not have heard before a few months ago: Generative AI. Bots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in November 2022. Since then, The Atlantic predicted the end of the college essay . For Vox, it’s the cover letter. And The New Yorker proclaimed the “death of the English major .”

Technology like AI changes what the English language—and the study of it—looks like. But death? Not quite. While peer institutions report dwindling numbers of humanities degrees, the English major remains a popular department at Colby, with 105 majors enrolled this year, along with 31 minors.

Why studying English is more important than ever  

On the surface, the situation for English majors might appear to be dire. If computers can write (and write well enough that few can tell the difference), what’s the point? But dig a little deeper, and the English major becomes more valuable, not less.

English majors double down on what AI can’t do: Be human.

“Writing moves us. Deeply, emotionally, intellectually. It answers the question, ‘Who am I?’” said Katherine Stubbs, associate professor of English and department chair. “AI can generate writing, but it’s the role of human intelligence to determine the true value of that writing. Literary study encourages not only critical analysis but also the use of the imagination, and it is our imagination that will help us to invent new solutions to urgent social problems.”

“The more the boundaries between human and AI feel blurry, the more important it will be to have somebody who’s been educated with a kind of sophisticated sense of the full range of creative possibilities of the human mind,” agreed Associate Professor of English and Science, Technology, and Society Aaron Hanlon. “When a new technology comes out, you can respond with doom and gloom, or optimism at what it can do. I think with AI, the type of work we do in the major only becomes more important, not less.”

For professor of English Adrian Blevins, there’s no contest. “The idea that the English major isn’t valuable or that it won’t get you a job is completely wrong,” she said. “The English major teaches us what it means to be human. I liken it to dreaming. There’s so much we don’t know about dreaming, but we do know that storytelling and narrative are central to human psychology.”

On writing in the age of AI 

As AI-generated writing becomes more ubiquitous, writing effectively becomes even more important. “I can easily tell the difference,” said Blevins. “It’s all about voice. I want to teach my students how to write with a voice so that they can say, ‘No one else but me wrote this.’ When you think about great literature, no one can really replicate it. Only Faulkner or Morrison or Hemingway could have done it.”

Asking ChatGPT to replicate certain writers turns out prose that on the surface seems legitimate, but there’s something laughably off.

Write a sentence about Colby College in the style of William Faulkner:

Amidst the rolling hills of Maine, there stands a venerable institution of learning, where the ivy-covered walls of Colby College bear witness to the passing of time and the unrelenting march of progress. 

Write a sentence about Colby College in the style of Toni Morrison:

In the heart of Maine, where the winds howl and the snow falls, there is a place of knowledge and discovery, where Colby College stands as a beacon of hope and possibility for all those who seek to unlock the secrets of the world.

Write a sentence about Colby College in the style of Ernest Hemingway:

Colby College, nestled in the rugged terrain of Maine, stood tall and proud like a sturdy oak, its students and faculty embodying the indomitable spirit of the American frontier.

Take a second look and you’ll see these sentences barely make sense, let alone capture the essence of the great writers AI claims to mimic. “Great writers mix different levels of diction, combining them in a way that sounds the way people talk,” said Blevins. “Sometimes it’s semi-ungrammatical, but it can create beautiful little sentences. AI can’t do that.”

At least, not yet.

That’s why generating and critiquing AI prompts is an example of a new assignment you’ll see in one of Hanlon’s classes. “My students are required to generate an essay using ChatGPT and write a critical report assessing historical accuracy, clarity, and logic,” he said. “Through this assignment, I want them to sort through what it can and what it can’t do.”

The makings of a modern English major

Like the English language, the study of English constantly changes. “We use a capacious definition of the word literature,” said Stubbs. “We teach literature from the Middle Ages to the present, from the literary canon, and from historically marginalized peoples. We’re reading Shakespeare, and we’re also reading texts from early African-American print culture, for example.”

In addition to a more traditional concentration in creative writing, Colby students can address issues of climate change by concentrating in environmental literature . It’s also becoming more common for students to add English to balance out a major in computer science, biology, or environmental science. Said Hanlon, “Students want to get grounded in the literature to apply that knowledge in other areas. We see a lot of overlap.”

We’re not close to robot overlords just yet. But as AI technology develops, the English Department is ready to help students think critically. “When we study literature, we come to understand the structures and systems that shape how we make and communicate meaning in the world and how we interpret the meanings in circulation on the screens and pages around us,” said Stubbs. “It is this faculty for analysis that will enable students to engage in the world, to effect urgent change through critical awareness of language and its power.”

A few great sentences

Generative AI may be able to ace the LSATs or write a passable cover letter, but there’s still something human about writing well it just can’t replicate. Writers often keep files of turns of phrase that move them. Here are some from Blevins’s swipe file that computers can’t come up with (yet):

“I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again.”

—Eudora Welty   

“From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes filled with dust motes which Quentin thought of as being of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”

—William Faulkner

“I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops and on corners and in doorways, and what was striking about them, I think, was that they did not seem to be talking. Never, when I passed these groups, did the usual sound of a curse or a laugh ring out and neither did there seem to be any hum of gossip.”

—James Baldwin

“When she loses at mah-jongg she takes it like a sport, not-like-the-others-whose-names-she-could-mention-but-she-won’t-not-even-Tilly- Hochman’s-it’s-too-petty-to-even-talk-about-let’s-just-forget-she-even-brought-it-up.”

—Philip Roth

“There isn’t any story.  It’s not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world—that’s the point. The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.”

—David Shields

Learning From a Simulated World

Michael Yankoski, a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, wants to use AI to help solve complex human problems

Colby Receives Major Gift to Establish the McVey Center for Computational and Data Sciences

New center will embed computational and data sciences across the curriculum and be distinctive among the liberal arts

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Colby AI Entrepreneurs Win Maine Startup Challenge

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Colby makes major investment in residential program, hail, class of 2028.

The College Essay Is Still Very Much Alive

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The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his work The Question Concerning Technology , describes the ways in which technology shapes and orders the world through the example of a hydroelectric plant on the Rhine River. In the example, the beauty of the river is overshadowed by its modern role as a “water-power supplier,” which “derives from the essence of the power station.” The river thus becomes valuable only for the sake of its role in production—its output—rather than its inherent beauty.

The image of the power plant on the Rhine demonstrates the ways in which technology can shift from being a helpful tool to an ordering principle of human life. The tension between these two ways of approaching technology crops up with almost every significant innovation, and the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is no exception. The unveiling of the software—an uncannily sophisticated large language model—was met with particular consternation (or, in some cases, celebration) for its potential impact on higher education. Stephen Marche’s December 6th article for The Atlantic is a prominent example of the sensationalized response to ChatGPT, in which Marche boldly argues that with the innovations in AI, “the college essay is dead.” However, rather than proclaiming the merits of AI as an educational tool (as he seems to have intended), Marche reduces students’ work to technological output, valuable for its product rather than its process.

Marche argues that the increasing sophistication of AI will not only create new opportunities for students to cheat or use language-generating software to write their essays, but that it will make the college essay obsolete altogether. The article takes particular aim at the unwillingness of the humanities to adapt to groundbreaking technologies. He writes that “In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?” Couching sweeping statements such as these in a broader argument about the lack of collaboration and mutual understanding between the fields of humanities and technology, Marche misrepresents the value of the humanities as a discipline and therefore the role that new technologies can and do play in humanities classrooms.

While critiques of Marche’s article have focused primarily on the role that AI will play in the changing landscape of academia, little attention has been directed to the article’s fundamental misunderstanding of the value of the college essay—and the substance of liberal arts education more broadly. If we cannot articulate the reason that the college essay has been the cornerstone of education in the humanities, it is impossible to determine whether it will be helped or hurt as we reach new horizons of technological advancement.

This is where Marche’s article falls short. He writes : “Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?”

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Ultimately, while an essay or dissertation is often the product of learning in the humanities, it is not the core substance. Seminar discussions, theoretical inquiries, stages of peer reviewing, oral defenses—these are the foundation upon which essays are constructed. And, during a time in which calls for diversity in higher academia have reached a fever pitch, these elements of an education in the humanities require students to investigate their unique identities and the role of those identities in the theoretical conversations into which they intend to enter. Because of this, the humanities are not simply an education in what to think, but how to think. As Plutarch famously stated : “[T]he mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.”

Perhaps, as Daniel Lametti argues in his own response to Marche’s article, ChatGPT can be used like other tools such as Grammarly or EasyBib. However, all of these automated tools are only as good as their input—bibliographic software will replicate whatever errors or stylistic formatting are present in the article cited (i.e., if a journal stylizes an author’s name in all capital letters or renders the volume and issue number in a way that the automated system cannot cleanly read). If students trust the software without ever bothering to learn the intricacies of Chicago or MLA styles, they could produce citations that are woefully incorrect without the ability to identify and correct errors. ChatGPT, likewise, produces language by replicating linguistic patterns found in millions of pages of data that have been input into the system—so, while it can produce a whole host of materials, from essays to poems to music, it cannot (to quell any fears of a technological dystopia) think for itself. A simple Twitter search for “AI malapropism” reveals hundreds of anecdotal examples of AI systems regurgitating text based on its probability of occurrence in lieu of the contextually-based wording intended by the author. Thus, if students do not understand what makes for good prose or stylistic academic writing, or if they cannot formulate a nuanced and original argument based on primary source material, how are they to judge whether the output of ChatGPT offers them a more compelling paper than what they have (or could have) written themselves?

Heidegger concludes his reflections on technology not by villainizing or valorizing technology, but instead by arguing that technology is valuable insofar as it is a tool to be used—not a manner of being in the world. Distilling the value of a student’s knowledge into simple output indicates that we have not made technology more human, but that we have come to regard humans as mere technology. ChatGPT and other AI innovations can certainly be tools in the arsenal of the humanist. But the humanist’s value, which Marche so adamantly questions, is in their ability to help students use the tools at their disposal rather than become merely machines of informational output.

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FIU Football: QB Keyone Jenkins Named Conference USA Offensive Player Of The Week

Kevin barral | 15 hours ago.

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MIAMI, FL - Following a week two performance where sophomore quarterback Keyone Jenkins completed 10 of 18 passes for 124 yards, two passing touchdowns and one rushing, the FIU Panther earned Conference USA Offensive Player of the Week for the first time in his career.

🏈 OFFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE WEEK 🏈 🏅1️⃣ Keyone Jenkins, @FIUFootball #NoLimitsOnUs | https://t.co/UmlmJYNkIH pic.twitter.com/3l1c7G4RBD — Conference USA (@ConferenceUSA) September 9, 2024

RELATED: Army Football: Holder Matthew Rhodes Named AAC Special Teams Player of the Week

Jenkins was a big part of FIU scoring their most points in a game since 2018. He is also the first Panther to earn a Player of the Week honor this season. Through two games, the sophomore leads Conference USA with three passing touchdowns.

Saturday's performance also included a 38-yard run, the longest of his career, which set up the first passing touchdown of the game to Eric Rivers.

A big reason for Jenkins' success on Saturday night was due to the offensive line play, which improved, only allowing one sack and allowing Jenkins himself to make good decisions with plenty of time to spare.

FIU will head to Boca Raton in the 22nd edition of the Shula Bowl as they look to snap a six-game losing streak against Florida Atlantic.

KEVIN BARRAL

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Will ChatGPT kill the student essay?

In less than 10 days since ChatGPT's public launch, The Atlantic published two sensational articles titled The College Essay is Dead and The End of High-School English , unmistakably signaling the significant threat posed by this AI tool to writing. While we enjoy the convenience brought by ChatGPT, we must also remain vigilant against the potential academic opportunism it may trigger.

Although ChatGPT can produce rich text, it does not imply that students can directly use its output for personal academic work. In the academic realm, integrity is paramount, and students should understand the severe consequences of plagiarism and cheating.

Several universities, including members of the Russell Group such as the University of Birmingham, the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh, strictly prohibit the use of ChatGPT in assignments and papers, considering it academic misconduct. Therefore, directly copying generated text from ChatGPT is unacceptable. Turnitin has introduced AI detection features, used by universities like the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales, to analyze text fragments and predict the proportion of AI-generated content in a paper.

Undeniably, ChatGPT is an excellent learning tool that students can use judiciously to enhance their papers and assignments. To avoid misuse, students should view ChatGPT as an academic aid rather than a replacement. For instance, in the writing process, students can use ChatGPT to gather ideas and keywords, but the final structure and expression should be the student's own creation. This approach allows students to leverage ChatGPT's supportive role while maintaining the originality of their academic work. Especially for language learners, ChatGPT can assist in refining language quality, improving grammar and enriching vocabulary, making the text more natural and authentic.

The data powering ChatGPT comes from various publicly available internet text resources, including web pages, books and articles. Although the model has encountered vast amounts of information during training and can generate seemingly authentic deceptive scientific papers, it does not know the specific sources of data and cannot provide citations or references for specific text. As ChatGPT's training data is cut off at 2022, it lacks the ability to update knowledge. Hence, students need to regularly consult the latest academic materials and stay informed about industry developments to avoid over-reliance on ChatGPT leading to outdated information.

To build an efficient academic support platform, students can actively contribute to ChatGPT's training data by sharing their academic experiences and knowledge. By helping ChatGPT better understand and respond to relevant questions, students can enhance its adaptability to the academic field. This two-way contribution not only aids in improving ChatGPT's performance but also provides students with richer opportunities for academic exchange. During the use of ChatGPT, students can integrate other learning methods, such as group discussions and mentor guidance, to form a comprehensive academic learning system. This way, students can avoid excessive dependence on ChatGPT and enhance their overall skills through diverse academic exchange methods.

In a nutshell, students are supposed to use ChatGPT wisely and judiciously, recognizing its advantages while being alert to potential academic risks. By understanding the nature of ChatGPT, maintaining academic integrity, considering it as an aid rather than a replacement and regularly updating knowledge, students can better avoid ChatGPT's potential for academic opportunism and truly realize its beneficial role as an assistant in the learning process.

The author is student of English Translation at Shandong University.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

If you have a specific expertise, or would like to share your thought about our stories, then send us your writings at [email protected] or [email protected].

The End of Democracy Has Already Begun

In the first episode of our new podcast, a look at how lies prime a society for a fall

The corruption of democracy begins with the corruption of thought—and with the deliberate undermining of reality. Stephen Richer, an election official in Arizona, and Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, learned firsthand how easily false stories and conspiracy theories could disorient their colleagues. They talk with hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev about how conformism and fear made it impossible to do their jobs.

This is the first episode of Autocracy in America , a new five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them . Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: Peter, picture this: A harsh winter has finally come to an end. Exhausted and ragged, America’s Revolutionary Army soldiers are huddled in tents. It’s Valley Forge. It’s 1778. And on a makeshift stage, a group of George Washington’s officers are putting on a play. It’s called Cato, A Tragedy .

Peter Pomerantsev: So they put on togas in the middle of a war?

Applebaum: History does not record what costumes they wore nor why, exactly, they were putting on a play at that particular moment. We do know it was one of Washington’s favorite plays. It was very popular in colonial America. It tells the story of the end of the Roman Republic, a democracy in its time, which was destroyed by a dictator, Julius Caesar.

Pomerantsev: So basically, Washington and the Founders, you know—their vision of the end of democracy was to be a dictator taking the capital by storm and grabbing power.

Applebaum: Every generation has a vision of how democracy dies, and this was theirs.

Pomerantsev: I mean, today when I’m in America, I hear a lot of, like, references to: The Nazis are coming. The fascists are coming.

Applebaum: You and I have both lived in countries that became more autocratic over time, meaning that the leader or the ruling party usurped more and more power, eliminating checks and balances. And we both know that this doesn’t necessarily look like stormtroopers marching in the streets.

Pomerantsev: And it happens sort of slowly, almost imperceptibly, like mold eating away a building. And it’s like these little things that actually show you that you’re going in the wrong direction.

Applebaum: Things become even more dangerous when people are sick of the political conversation and just want it to end, and they want someone to come along and end it.

Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic .

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America .

Pomerantsev: In this podcast, we are not talking about some distant, dystopian, totalitarian state.

Applebaum: This is not a show about America’s future. It’s about the present.

Pomerantsev: There are authoritarian tactics already at work in America, eating away at the guardrails that prevent a leader from usurping power, and we are going to show you where.

Applebaum: Look at what we have already: widening apathy, politicized investigations, the embrace of the strongman cult.

Pomerantsev: And in this episode: psychological corruption.

Applebaum: Peter, when did you start to see things in the United States shift—shift away from a democratic culture?

Pomerantsev: Look, it’s a slightly personal issue for me. My parents were Soviet dissidents in Soviet Ukraine, where I was born. They were arrested by the KGB. We were exiled in the late 1970s (I was still a baby at the time), and after the fall of the U.S.S.R., I went and lived in Russia and Moscow from 2001 to 2010. That was the first 10 years of the Putin era and, in that time, I saw Russia degrade from a really rotten democracy to a really aggressive dictatorship.

And I actually remember one moment quite clearly: This must have been still during the Obama era. I was visiting the U.S. on holiday or for a work trip or something, and I suddenly found myself among groups of people who subscribed to this idea of birtherism, that Obama had not been born in America.

Applebaum: Exactly. And if he wasn’t born in America, then he’s not qualified to be president .

Pomerantsev: But it was the way they were talking about it. I mean, the evidence was not important to them. I mean, you could provide loads of evidence that Obama had been born in America—that wasn’t the point. The way they were using this conspiracy was kind of a real warning sign.

This wasn’t like, I don’t know, the Kennedy assassination, where people try to find the truth out. Here, people I met who signed up to the birther conspiracy didn’t care about evidence. They said things I heard in Russia when it was fading into dictatorship. They would say, I don’t know. The truth is unknowable. There are no such things as real facts or even evidence . But what did matter was how you signaled your political affiliation by making a conspiratorial statement.

Applebaum: Yep, and this is exactly how a conspiracy theory—a big lie—functions in an autocratic political system. It helps the leader, the autocrat, establish who’s loyal, who’s on our side, and who’s not. You know, if you promise to believe in the made-up story, then you can work for the government or the party or whatever, and if you don’t, you’re out. And so this then, not merit or hard work, determines who gets promoted and who runs things.

Pomerantsev: To show that you belonged to the Putin system, you had to repeat absurd lies that people Putin was arresting were guilty of totally absurd charges. You had to agree that Nazis were taking over Ukraine. You know, that could be socially very awkward at first, and people could get quite aggressive, especially when they were drunk. And after a while, it just became dangerous because if you disagreed with these absurd statements, with these conspiracy theories, then you were essentially an enemy of the state. And that would become incredibly dangerous.

Applebaum: When I first saw birtherism unfolding in the U.S., my first reaction was, No way is this happening here. Americans can’t fall for this kind of garbage .

Pomerantsev: Sorry—why did you think Americans were immune, just out of interest?

Applebaum: Wrongly, I imagined our political system is too big, and our democracy is too well anchored, and people don’t believe in conspiracy theories. And obviously I was wrong.

Pomerantsev: You know, once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore.

Applebaum: Eastern Europeans are familiar with the idea of ruling by conspiracy. But in contemporary America, this is new. And it’s so new, in fact, that I’m not sure Americans realize the significance of it.

Stephen Richer: In May of 2021, Donald Trump accused me of deleting files from the 2020 election. And that was—it’s just hard to describe, but it’s a little bit like the Eye of Sauron. With that, when it’s turned on you, you feel it, and people start contacting you, and you get a lot of ugliness directed your way.

Applebaum: Stephen Richer is an election official in Maricopa County, Arizona. And this disorienting accusation began, at first, as something completely impossible for him to imagine: that the president knew his name and was releasing statements directed at his office.

CNN newscaster Erin Burnett: Tonight, a bitter feud erupting among Arizona Republicans over an election audit of the state’s most populous county. Fox 10 Phoenix newscaster Ty Brennan: Trump released a statement yesterday saying, quote, “The entire database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been deleted. This is illegal, and the Arizona state Senate, who is leading the forensic audit, is up in arms.”

Applebaum: At first, it felt somewhat impossible for Richer to take this kind of accusation seriously. He knew it wasn’t true. He could see all the files on the county computers every day he went to work. They hadn’t disappeared at all.

Brennan: In response, Republican recorder Stephen Richer sent out a tweet saying, quote, “Wow. This is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer.”

Applebaum: And then these claims started to take hold with other big players in the Trump circle.

Richer: Christina Bobb from One America News Network was here. The “Stop the Steal” candidates throughout the country would come into Arizona and almost pay pilgrimage, pay homage to that production. Applebaum: And were the attacks on you—what were they accusing you of doing? Richer: Everything from rigging tabulation equipment to falsifying evidence to deleting electronic files to, you know, turning my back on my people to not maintaining proper chain of custody. I just—the breadth is really breathtaking. Some of it is quite imaginative, and never in a million years would I have thought that somebody would have accused me of shredding ballots from the 2020 election, feeding them to chickens, and then burning the chickens to cover the evidence.

Pomerantsev: It’s something right out of the sort of absurdist stories that you hear about politics in Eastern Europe, where the regime is using absolutely nonsensical charges against you, and their very absurdity shows that you’re kind of powerless to fight back. Because how do you fight back against somebody accusing you of feeding chickens with election ballots?

Applebaum: Right. This was the kind of archetypic, absurdist thing that happened in communist Poland or communist Czechoslovakia. You know, you would be accused of something ludicrous or ridiculous, and there would be no way to defend yourself. But the whole system would somehow take it incredibly seriously.

Pomerantsev: You can’t actually fight back against absurdity. It’s actually very—well, let me put it differently: It starts off funny, and then it becomes really creepy.

I kind of always thought, just like you did with birtherism and with conspiracy theories, that in the U.S., false accusations would be quickly knocked down by the press—just by the system that is, at the end of the day, grounded in some sort of rationality. Or at the very least, I kind of thought that somebody like Stephen Richer—who, well, let’s put it very basically, is a white election official, not a particularly vulnerable member of society—that they would be able to defend themselves pretty easily against blatant lies. But that is not what was happening at all.

Applebaum: No, in Maricopa County, which is a completely ordinary part of America, we see not just accusations of fraud but ridiculous accusations of fraud, and they were being taken seriously.

Richer: I remember vividly one of the meetings I went to in front of a group of about 50 grassroots activists in the Republican Party, and the first question they asked was, Were the tabulation machines in 2020 connected to the internet? And we had just had three professional elections-technologies companies come in and test that very thing, among other things. So I knew, categorically, as sure as I possibly could, that the answer to that was no. But you could look into their faces and see that that was not going to go down well. And I said it, and then it turned into just a lot of shouting, a lot of obscenities, and then ultimately following me out to my car.

Applebaum: It got personal, and it got much worse from there.

Richer: A man from Missouri made a phone call telling me, in no uncertain terms, what he thought of me and what he was going to do because I had said that President Trump’s comments were unhinged regarding his allegations that I had deleted the files. Applebaum: And do you think that the people who criticized you or attacked you—do you think they believed Trump, or had they departed already from any idea of reality, or was it something they said for political reasons? Richer: The politicians say it for political reasons. I think the people online and a lot of the people from the Republican grass roots of Arizona who email me really believe it. And it conforms to what they want to believe about the world, which is, I think, a real victimization right now and an explanation of how they lost in 2020 that isn’t simply that more Arizonans voted for Joe Biden, because I don’t think they want to embrace that possibility. And it’s incompatible with the world that they see around them when they go to Trump events and see Trump flags, and their neighbors voted for Trump.

NBC 12News newscaster Tram Mai: It appears to be official. Arizona’s attorney general has opened an investigation into the 2020 presidential election. Former Maricopa— Richer: Mark Brnovich was somebody that I was on friendly terms with, and he had told me that he knew it was all nonsense, but we moved more and more apart as he continued to indulge it. And then, in the late months of 2021, he launched a criminal investigation into the 2020 election over six months.

Pomerantsev: So, Anne, how did we actually get here? There’s a statement from then-President Trump. Then there’s pilgrimages from national figures to Maricopa County.

Applebaum: Exactly. This is where rumors and talk transformed yet again, not just into dramatic pilgrimages and pressure campaigns but now into an actual criminal investigation by the Arizona attorney general.

Richer: He committed 10,000 man-hours to investigating it. It is especially scary to think that somebody who is willing to indulge these delusional beliefs could have been the chief prosecutor for the state of Arizona.

Pomerantsev: Anne, I just can’t help feeling there’s a bigger story here. It’s not about just what happened in Arizona. It’s about: How did something so unhinged, something so absurd become so normalized in the Republican Party?

Applebaum: There are a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, who are trying to understand that. That’s after the break.

Applebaum: Peter, Adam Kinzinger is a former Republican congressman in Washington, where a lot of examples are set that then trickle down to state and local politics. Kinzinger was in office from 2011 to 2023, and he saw the changes in the party as they were happening, and he played along with them a little bit himself, at least for a while, before changing his mind completely.

Adam Kinzinger: Yeah. So, you know, I was raised during the time of Reagan, when I started to pay attention to politics and, you know, always just really believed in the role of America. I grew up hearing that America is this force for good. You know, I was alive during the Soviet Union. I saw, at a young age, the Berlin Wall fall. I saw the iron curtain torn down. And I gave credit for that to the Republican Party, you know, the party that was unabashedly pro-America.

Applebaum: Peter, Kinzinger was very idealistic, like many people who join Congress. But then he discovered that the reality of politics wasn’t always so noble and that, to be part of the party, sometimes you go on TV to say things that rally the base.

Kinzinger on TV recordings, overlapping: Yeah, well, look: This is obviously a reason why I think we need real border security— —but that ISIS has grown to where it even eclipses Al Qaeda— Congress may be unpopular. Look, we all get that. We understand it. But that doesn’t mean Congress doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean you conveniently get to throw out the Constitution.

Applebaum: Kinzinger’s ability to speak for the party on TV and elsewhere got more complicated because right after Donald Trump’s inauguration—immediately—Trump started saying absurd things about how he’d had the largest crowds in history. No one had ever seen so many people on the National Mall .

Kinzinger: Yeah, just shortly after that, you know, dismissing what we see in pictures.

Pomerantsev: The pictures showed that it wasn’t a very big crowd out there. So, you know, he was sort of saying that to be part of his group, part of this new political in-group that rules the country, you’ve got to repeat these absurd statements, and that will show that you’re one of us.

Applebaum: Exactly. In this case, it was ridiculous. I mean, who cares how many people were at the inauguration? But he insisted that his press spokesman get the National Park Service to lie about how many people there were, because only through forcing people to lie, forcing institutions to lie, could he prove their loyalty. And this is another classic piece of authoritarian behavior.

Pomerantsev: Authoritarianism doesn’t start with something huge. It’s like taking or giving a tiny, little bribe—five bucks or something. It doesn’t sound like a big thing. But that’s it. You’re hooked. And then it’s just like cotton candy. It reels you in. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Applebaum: Right. So all the while, Adam Kinzinger was increasingly forced into a kind of mental gymnastics. He did, for a while, continue to go on TV, speaking for the GOP on issues that he cared about but without fully aligning himself with the commander in chief.

Kinzinger on TV recordings, overlapping: I agree with what the president’s saying about Iran. I think him pulling out of the nuclear deal was huge. Iran has, by the way, about 40,000 troops in Syria. Obviously, I think there’s some things I wish he wouldn’t put on Twitter. But when it comes to some of these issues, like with North Korea, I think there’s benefit in that unpredictability— I wish what the president wouldn’t do is show any kind of division with his intelligence chiefs. I think it’s not beneficial for us. It’s not beneficial for our presence on the world stage.

Pomerantsev: You can really hear Kinzinger trying to find a way to be loyal to his party and yet keep his integrity and criticize the leader.

Applebaum: And he continued to try and find that balance, but he found less and less camaraderie among members of his party, especially as the investigation into President Trump’s ties with Russia began.

Kinzinger: This was during the Russia investigation. This person—all I remember is they were a sane, rational person—just said, Yeah, but I think the Democrats are making this up to go after him . And I remember specifically thinking, You know that that’s not true . But then I started to understand, like, you can convince yourself of anything. If you have to rationalize your behavior, you can convince yourself of anything. So if you know that you have to defend Donald Trump, despite his ties to Russia or his sympathy to Russia—if you know that and, you know, that’s hard for you to do—you can convince yourself that the Democrats are making this up. You can start out doublespeaking and saying one thing to one group and another thing to another. But, eventually, even the leaders, even those pushing out the false narratives, eventually they get corrupted too, and they believe their own garbage. And that’s a very dangerous moment.

Pomerantsev: It’s a dangerous moment and also sort of the infection of mental corruption spreading. I saw the same thing happen in Russia as it tipped into being a full-blown autocracy.

It was around 2014. I remember the moment very clearly: Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and people that I knew who worked in state media and the bureaucracy—who’d always been so cynical, sort of smirking when they repeated the government’s lines, signaling that they knew that all the propaganda was a stupid game, that they were just playing along—suddenly, when the war started, they had this completely blank look and this total seriousness as they repeated the government lies, that the revolution in Ukraine, which was this incredible act of heroism by the Ukrainian people, was, I don’t know, all a CIA plot. I kept on looking for their old smirk—the little glint in the eye—but suddenly they were just delivering it like zombies. Something had changed. They knew now that they had to inhabit these lies fully if they were going to survive in a new paradigm.

Applebaum: And this vulnerability to mental corruption is very human. It’s just like what happened in 2015 when the plane-crash conspiracy theory in Poland started to take hold.

Pomerantsev: This is the plane-crash conspiracy that the former government had actually been—what? Brought down by—

Applebaum: The president’s plane crashed carrying a lot of military and political leaders as well. And the plane crash was an accident. It was extensively investigated. The black boxes were found. There had been a pilot error.

But then, the late president’s brother, who was also the leader of what was then the political opposition in the parliament, began claiming that the crash was deliberate—maybe it was caused by his political rivals, maybe by the Russians. A lot of people dismissed this. There was no evidence for it.

But once there had been a change of power—once the president’s brother’s party was in charge of the government, the conspiratorial party—then all kinds of people suddenly thought, Well, you know, they won. They must be right. The conspiracy must be true. And even if it’s not true, it’s in my interest to repeat it. And then they began to repeat the same lies as the people in charge.

Pomerantsev: “Truth,” and I’m saying that in inverted commas, becomes whatever the powerful say it is. I’m often asked, like, Do Russians believe in all the lies that Putin’s propaganda says?

Applebaum: And it’s completely the wrong question. Completely wrong.

Pomerantsev: Exactly. It’s the wrong question. Because, you know, if you think about belief as, you know, a set of beliefs that you’ve thought about and you’ve worked out and you’ve decided that represents you—you know, these are your thoughts, what you stand for—I mean, that matters in a society where your opinion matters.

But here it’s the other way around. You say that which marks your belonging in order to feel some sort of psychological comfort. But tomorrow if the line changes, well, then you’ll believe that.

Kinzinger: You look at Nazi Germany, and you’re like, How could an entire population of Germans do what they did? And I understand it now, because if you’re living in an environment where there’s so much pressure, you can convince yourself of anything. I’m not comparing Republicans to Nazis, but I can see now how, when that pressure is so intense, you can convince yourself of anything simply to survive. I have come to believe in my life that people, more than they fear death, they fear not belonging. I think there are more people that would step in front of a train to save a child than there are people that would be willing to leave their party and be an outlier.

Pomerantsev: For me, I find it somewhat petrifying because basically this means a political system where truth and facts and evidence—they aren’t a currency anymore. You can’t have a democratic debate about anything, really. What Adam Kinzinger is talking about here, it’s a very, very anxious moment. And I’m not quite sure how you go back from that moment.

Applebaum: And, of course, it’s also true that once you aren’t having a conversation about reality, you’re not talking about things that have actually happened, then you’re in a different kind of political conversation. Then all you have is anger and emotion and people expressing themselves in order to confirm their identities or to attack somebody else’s identity.

And then you’re not talking about health care or roads or how to build bridges, where the next investment should be or how high taxes are. Instead, you’re in a different kind of politics. And I do think that America crossed into that world.

Pomerantsev: There might be something else going on as well, because at some level, you know, people who are inhabiting this anti-fact, anti-truth identity—at some level, they must always know that that’s not quite them. You know, even if they’re now performing it very seriously, they’re still performing it.

Applebaum: And so you’re saying there’s a psychological cost to having a kind of double life?

Pomerantsev: And when they see someone like a Kinzinger calling them out, saying, Hold on. You weren’t like this before. This is not true , then that sort of just causes this sort of visceral anger.

Applebaum: Yeah, I think it’s anger because someone like Kinzinger is letting down the side. But also, he’s able to say things in a freer way, and there’s a kind of jealousy there as well. That’s also the moment when he was ostracized. And for Kinzinger, it finally happened when he made his decision to vote for the impeachment of President Trump.

CBS newscaster Anthony Mason: “Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the growing number of House Republicans to publicly say they will vote to impeach the president. He joins us now.” Kinzinger: To me, I think by the time that impeachment vote came up, I was blown away that it was only 10 of us. I mean, you know, when I broke with the GOP—yeah, I guess there’s any number of ways people react. Some were confused. Did you become a Democrat now? Are you a Democrat? Like you only have two options or something—like, you know, the idea of being somebody that actually could think for yourself was foreign to these folks. And so when you make the decision to go against the party, to leave the party, first off, you realize who your friends are, and then you realize you don’t have near as many as you thought you did. Applebaum: Can you remember any specific people who dropped you or who were nasty to you? Kinzinger: Oh yeah. You know, the guy I fought with in Iraq sent me a text that said, I’m ashamed to have ever flown with you. Applebaum: Wow. Kinzinger: And there was nothing about our friendship or our time in Iraq together that was political. We fought the enemy. But all of a sudden, he’s ashamed to have fought in a war with me because—what? He disagrees with my political stand?

Applebaum: What Kinzinger found when he was speaking freely was not only did his relationships with people around him change but his whole life became much more dangerous.

Kinzinger: We had people, you know, all in the name of Christ, for some reason—and I say this as a Christian. It’s embarrassing to me for people to say that they want the Lord to strike me and my family down. Why? Because I told you the truth? Because the Bible I looked at, the truth was what you’re supposed to be telling. People wishing my son, who was six months old at the time, would die. I mean, these are the kinds of things that you just, like—you realize the rot in people’s lives. But I was less concerned about those making calls and leaving messages when they’re drunk on Fox News than I was about the people that wouldn’t bother calling. Because, to them, it would be some just battle to go and kill a congressman, right?

Pomerantsev: And, I mean, it’s kind of extraordinary in all the worst possible ways. A U.S. congressman in the United States of America who’s afraid that he’ll be murdered because he refused to go along with a set of utter lies about the 2020 election and the assault on the Capitol. And, you know, one has to feel for Kinzinger and kind of admire him. But he was experiencing these threats at a really high level.

And I can’t forget about the story we started with in Maricopa County in Arizona: Stephen Richer. In a sense, he was far more vulnerable there, and he and his team were having the full weight of the Republican law machine come down on them.

Applebaum: I asked Stephen Richer to talk to me about that.

Applebaum: How did this impact your day-to-day life? Did your commute to work change? Did you think differently about trips to the grocery store or anything like that?

Richer: We took certain precautions at our homes. We built a new security system. And security just got baked into the elections-administration puzzle so much more, such that all of our facilities are just very secure facilities now. I would say the biggest impact it’s had is just where I go. I don’t put myself into some of the places where, quite frankly, I feel I need to be speaking because they need to be hearing some of this—places where I don’t know if it would be smart, and it certainly wouldn’t be fun. Applebaum: Meaning places where there are Republicans? Richer: Like the grassroots groups, you know, where it’s a gathering of 50-plus people who are, you know—they’re angry. They’re angry about life. They’re angry about the world. They’re certainly angry about the 2020 election. And certainly a lot of their anger has been directed towards people like me.

Applebaum: Not all this anger just stays in people’s heads. You have the attempted murder of Congressman Steve Scalise in 2017; the plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, in 2020; a gunman outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. And also, in that same year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house intending to kidnap her and wound up smashing her husband’s head with a hammer instead.

Pomerantsev: And then, of course, this summer, a 20-year-old in Pennsylvania tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally. The bullet grazed his ear.

Applebaum: But all of these examples involve big names—congressmen, Supreme Court justices. In Arizona, we’re talking about local government workers. This is a county election office. And yet, Richer and his team in 2021 are being questioned and harassed and threatened and even investigated by the state’s attorney general, under pressure from the president of the United States. And this was really hard on Richer’s staff.

Richer: There’s a number of people for whom this was a job, and they found it on a county website, and they like the people that they’re working with. They like that it’s consistent. And it rattled quite a few people. Some of them would come to me, just alarmed: Am I going to be arrested? I didn’t do anything.

Pomerantsev: Anne, this is a really important moment, where it’s not just about conspiracists believing their own reality. They start to force it onto other people. People start feeling really awkward and guilty and start internalizing the guilt. I mean, a bit of your brain starts going, Well, did I do it? What if they’re right? What if two plus two equals five? What’s going on here?

Applebaum: It’s unsettling, and people talk about it years later and don’t always recover. I mean, the moment when they were afraid of being arrested for some absurd political claim, the moment when they were forced to say something or do something they didn’t believe—these are moments when you suddenly feel a sharp break with what’s supposed to be normal and what life is supposed to be like.

Pomerantsev: Let’s be frank: People get accused of murders they haven’t committed. I mean, there’s all sorts of horrible things that happen, even in the most, you know, advanced democracies. So these things happen.

What’s happening here is a political attack on one of the institutions, the electoral commission, that is meant to guarantee the facts of our democracy. So it’s a sort of strategic attack on the infrastructure of reason that supports a functioning democracy.

Applebaum: Well, the infrastructure of reason is still standing in Maricopa County. The Kafkaesque investigation into Richer ended, and the attorney general in Arizona is an elected position. A Democrat now holds the job.

NBC 12News newscaster Mark Curtis: For almost a year, the state’s top prosecutor concealed his own investigators’ reports that would have showed Arizonans that there was no evidence of election fraud in 2020. Now that Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich has left office, his Democratic successor, Kris Mays, released the reports today. NBC 12News newscaster Caribe Devine: Team 12’s Brahm Resnik is joining us in studio with more on these bombshell reports. Brahm? NBC 12News reporter Brahm Resnik: Yeah, keep in mind that former—

Pomerantsev: This slew of prosecutions and personal attacks has a very direct consequence on democracy. It means that ordinary people just don’t want to be part of it. They don’t want to work in these jobs without which democracy doesn’t actually happen.

Applebaum: I asked Stephen Richer what he’s doing these days in order to recruit and rehire at the county clerk’s office.

Richer: I tell them: You get a front row seat to history . I tell them that 10, 20, 30 years—whatever it is—from now, this will be a chapter in American textbooks. And for whatever reason, of all the bars in all the towns in all the world, Maricopa County figures in prominently to this conversation, and our office figures in prominently.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and me, Anne Applebaum. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is produced by The Atlantic and made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University , an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.

Applebaum: I suppose that was a happy ending of a kind. Although, this summer, Richer lost a Republican primary. The investigations ended, but many Arizonans continue to believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

Pomerantsev: What happens if the courts are undermined and are willing to go along with that conspiracy? What if the psychological corruption becomes political corruption? What if the online mobs shouting about conspiracy theories and the people calling congressmen to threaten their children—what if those people get control of a congressional committee, a government department, or a courthouse?

Applebaum: It’s beginning to happen already.

Renée DiResta: That, for me, was a real Oh, wow moment, because I thought, Surely, we’re not that far gone . And then, yeah—and then I realized, Maybe we are, actually .

Applebaum: That’s next time on Autocracy in America .

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