In 1876, an editorial in Princeton’s newly founded campus newspaper, The Princetonian, argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. Proctoring was “a means of bad moral education,” the author wrote. Treat students as presumptively dishonest, and some would become so; treat them as honorable, and they would learn to behave honorably. And so the editorial board suggested a different approach: “Let every man write at the end of his paper a pledge that he has neither given nor received help, and let professors and tutors address themselves to some better business than watching for fraud.”

That proposal was eventually embodied in Princeton’s famous Honor Code, adopted in 1893 and modified only lightly in the ensuing 133 years. When students take their final exams, professors leave the room. Students write down a pledge not to cheat. They are expected to report anyone who does. Any student accused of impropriety comes before a jury of their peers.

The Honor Code had a good run. F. Scott Fitzgerald (who enrolled at Princeton in 1913 but did not graduate) once wrote that violating it “simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook.” The code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again. Technically, the Honor Code is still in place. Students will still sign a pledge that they didn’t cheat. But now professors will be watching to make sure they’re telling the truth. The Honor Code can’t run on the honor system anymore.

[Rose Horowitch: What an Ivy League education really gets you]

Even at Princeton, obviously, some students have always cheated. Fitzgerald himself was scandalized when, during a campus visit a decade after his time at the university, a member of the football team told him that his roommate knew of unreported Honor Code violations. (Shortly thereafter, a fellow alumnus shared the same suspicion with the famous novelist.) “The implication was that these were many,” Fitzgerald wrote to the dean. Back then, however, academic dishonesty was constrained not only by codes of conduct but by the amount of effort it required. A student who wanted to cheat had to go to the trouble of finding someone who would let them copy their answers.

The internet and the shift to doing work on computers rather than by hand dramatically lowered the barriers to cheating. A study of thousands of students at Rutgers University found that, in 2017, a majority copied their homework answers from the internet. AI has taken that dynamic to new extremes. It can mimic any writing style, produce a unique essay, and add in typos to make it appear human-authored. The available detectors are not foolproof. Studies have consistently found that teachers are worse than they think at detecting AI usage. “It’s a temptation,” Anthony Grafton, a longtime Princeton history professor who retired last year, told me. “I can imagine the student with the devil over his or her left shoulder and the angel over his or her right shoulder.”

Since generative AI became widely available, in fall 2022, Princeton has seen rising academic dishonesty. The Committee on Discipline, which has jurisdiction over take-home assignments, found 82 students responsible for academic violations in the 2024–25 academic year, compared with 50 students in 2021–22. Those are just the students who manage to get caught; the real numbers are undoubtedly much higher. In the school newspaper’s survey of graduating seniors, which 501 students responded to, 30 percent said that they had cheated, 28 percent said that they had used ChatGPT on an assignment when it was not allowed, and 45 percent said that they knew of cheating by a peer and chose not to report it. Michael Laffan, a Princeton history professor, told me that he has sat in coffee shops near campus and watched as students copied responses from ChatGPT and passed them off as their own.

The ease of AI-enabled cheating seems to be imparting a “bad moral education” of its own. Cheating has become more visible, Nadia Makuc, a senior at Princeton and former chair of the Honor Committee, told me. Students post about violating the Honor Code on Fizz, the campus’s anonymous social-media app. That makes students who play by the rules feel like suckers. “There’s an air of people cheating on take-homes and people just using ChatGPT,” Makuc said. “As long as people think there is more cheating, it encourages more cheating.”

[Ian Bogost: College students have already changed forever]

Princeton’s professors are finally trying to reset the system. Proctors are just one component. In the past year, the number of take-home exams at Princeton has declined by more than two-thirds. Next year, the economics department will require its majors to do an oral defense of their research projects, Smita Brunnermeier, the director of undergraduate studies, told me. David Bell, a history professor, has also added in oral exams and switched from short take-home papers to in-class writing in blue books. One of his colleagues in the history department forces students to write their papers in Google Docs so that he can review the stages of their composition.

In short, what the 1876 editorial called a “system of suspicion and surveillance” is making a comeback. “It does change something about the student-faculty relationship,” William Aepli, a graduating senior and the former chair of the group that represents students accused of violating the Honor Code, told me. “It’s one thing to have proctoring from the very beginning. It’s another thing to have this tradition of self-proctoring exams and trust that students abide by the Honor Code, and then to take that away.”

Bell told me that AI has made him more wary of his students, and that they can tell. When he changes his assignments to keep them from cheating, they understand that he doesn’t trust them. “Inevitably, all the solutions involve a greater degree of surveillance—that’s the one thing in common,” he said. “Maybe we’ll just have to get used to this new kind of police state of instruction. But I’m not eager to see where this leads.”

Much of higher education’s value rests on the assumption that cheating is an exception, not the rule. A diploma is meaningless if employers and graduate programs can’t trust that graduates learned something in college. Prospective students and their families must believe that their tuition dollars will purchase a good education. And taxpayers need to trust that public-school students are getting something from their four years of subsidized education. Rampant AI use breaks down these signals. “It is bad policy to suspect a man of being a rogue in order to be sure that he is a scholar,” The Princetonian warned in 1876. Perhaps so. But the alternative is even worse.

Orion is rarely seen like this.

“I wonder if these people have ever seen a student’s face when they finally understand something for the first time.”

Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies and historical theologian at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, was talking with her students about changes she has made to her teaching so as to safeguard student learning from artificial intelligence when “a wave of sadness washed over me, and I actually got choked up in front of the class.”

“Before AI,” I told them, “Students used to work hard to come up with their own ideas. I’d help, and they’d struggle, but they’d come to something that was their own. That doesn’t happen anymore and I grieve that.” Then I felt embarrassed and went on teaching as though nothing had happened.

Her reflections on this experience will resonate with many Daily Nous readers. She identifies one of the many feelings she has been having about how AI is altering education as grief.

[Trenton Doyle Hancock, detail of untitled etching from “Bye and Bye”]

AI promises great gains, but many educators sense that with its advent, we have lost so much. In this particular instance, students have lost the freedom to sit comfortably in a space of silence and uncertainty, a space as dark and rich as the spring soil in which seedlings are born. And I have lost the joy of sitting with them, encouraging them, watching as their thoughts take root and grow…

The [American Psychological Association] defines grief as “the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.” We are witnessing the death not of a beloved person, but of love as the grounds of education. Love is the heart of a liberal education—a love of the truth, as well as the kind of friendship-love (philia) between teachers and students that makes it possible to pursue the truth together.

AI sycophants would have you believe that teachers like me are simply scared of a new system that will expose their personal deficiencies and outdated pedagogical methods—intractability about AI is ultimately self-interested self-preservation. Dear teacher, you are not fooling anyone but yourself—those lecture notes belong in the bin.

I wonder if these people have ever seen a student’s face when they finally understand something for the first time. What’s more, I wonder if they’ve ever seen a student experience the unique delight in not knowing. Certainly, the unknown can produce confusion and frustration. But sometimes I see in students’ faces a flash of something like the relish of a traveler who knows the journey ahead will be just as delightful as the destination. 

Professor Peters says that this “delight in not knowing” is something that’s especially valuable to cultivate in students studying theology, and I imagine many Daily Nous readers think the same is true of philosophy.

At the end of her piece, which you can read in its entirety here, she says: “despite being aware of the real losses in education, I still believe the love and wonder at the heart of education can be salvaged, somehow. The question is, how?”

(via Zena Hitz)

The post Grieving What AI Has Taken from Learning first appeared on Daily Nous.

That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great?

Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War.  (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back then, and still figuring stuff out).  To summarize: the Portuguese Man-o’-War is a large jellyfish-type creature.  And when I say “large”, I mean they can grow as big as a large cat, with stinging tentacles dangling for many meters beneath and around them.  They’re carnivores, feeding on fish and small invertebrates.  Their stings paralyze prey, which is then drawn upward into the main body, digested, and eaten.  (In that order.)   

In the post I mention that they have a parasitic fish that afflicts them, but I don’t talk about any of their other relationships.  (As I said, that post was plenty long enough.)  So now I’m going to talk about an organism that interacts with the Man-o’-War in a different way:  a predator. 

Specifically Glaucus Atlanticus, the Blue Dragon Sea Slug.


[yes, they really look like this.]

Also known as the Sea Swallow, or the Blue Angel, or… man, just look at that.  Isn’t that just ridiculously gorgeous?  Well, these guys(1) look this way for reasons.  Let’s discuss.

(1) English “guy” and “guys” are currently in an awkward blurry space between male-coded and gender-neutral.  But these guys are obligate hermaphrodites, so it’s not an issue.

So sea slugs aren’t very closely related to land slugs.  They’re marine molluscs that evolved from a shelled, snail-like ancestor way back in the Paleozoic.  They’re formally known as nudibranchs — pronounced nooda Bronx, or just “nudies” if you’re a diver.  (If you’re being a huge nerd about it, there are some sea slugs that aren’t formally nudibranchs.  Never mind that now.)

They’re often some combination of weird and beautiful.  A few examples:

[I literally just grabbed some pictures at random]

Giving up their shell freed them of a major metabolic burden and liberated them to swim around.  But it also meant they had to evolve new defenses against being eaten.  Which they did.  Some evolved incredibly good camouflage; some used their flexible bodies to mimic more dangerous creatures; some evolved internal toxins that made them taste nasty.  And a bunch of them, including the Blue Dragon, evolved venomous stings.

But in the case of the Blue Angel / Blue Dragon, they evolved stings, but they never evolved venom.  Because the Dragons don’t make venom.  They steal it.  These slugs get their venom from eating venomous prey, particularly and preferentially Portuguese Man-o’-Wars.

[a couple of Blue Dragons closing on a Man-o’-War, like biplanes attacking a zeppelin.
(c) imagequestmarine.com, via Fae Sapsford]

— You might wonder how a slug can bite pieces off something.  Well, strictly speaking slugs don’t have jaws.  But most molluscs have a hard chewing apparatus called a “radula”.  And in the case of the Blue Dragon, the radula has convergently evolved into something that looks and works exactly like a jaw.


[specifically, like the kind of jaw you have nightmares about]

So it has no trouble slicing pieces off the soft-bodied Man-o’-War.  And by doing so, it gains a sting powerful enough to cause severe pain, blisters, cramps, nausea and vomiting even in an adult human.


[very bad idea!  please do not!]

So all this has been known for a while now — decades.  And it’s weird but not unique.  There are a number of species that do something similar.  There’s even a technical term for it:  kleptocnidy.  The Dragons eat the Man-o’-War’s stinging tentacles and gain the ability to sting.  (They eat the rest of the poor Man-o’-War, too.  In fact, despite being around 1/100 of the Man-o’-War’s size, they’re an important and dangerous predator.)

But when you get down to the cell-tissue-organ level?  The way this works is pretty crazy.  

First, somehow the Dragon’s digestive system sorts out the stinging cells.  We know where inside the slug this happens (the liver) but we still don’t know how.

Next, the Dragon has specialized cells that grab and digest the stinging cells, but that keep the stingy bits.  The part that stings is called a nematocyst, and it’s an organelle within the cell.  The Dragon has cells that use a modified form of phagocytosis to do this.  Phagocytosis is what your white blood cells do to invading bacteria — they flow around, engulf, and dissolve.  The Dragon’s cells do this, except they don’t digest (or even disturb) the delicate nematocyst.  

[How did this evolve?  Did the slugs have something like a white blood cell, which they then adapted to this new use?  Apparently this is an area of ongoing research right now.]

Okay, now comes the really insane part.  You see those long feathery “fingers” on either side of the slug?

[the better to hug you with, my dear]

Those are called “cerrata”.  And the slug’s digestive system has specialized ducts that connect to them.  You and I have digestive systems that are straightforward tubes, but the slug’s digestive system has branches.  And the slug’s specialized cells transport the nematocysts out to the ends of those branches, and then stuff them into special stinging organs there.

It’s a bit as if you could eat a plateful of bees, and then your intestines would wrap up the bee stings, and then special branch-intestines would reach into your arms and hands, carrying the stings there.  So that you could deliver hundreds of bee stings with the touch of a finger.

Back to the paper, then.  All of the above is old knowledge.  What wasn’t known was what the slug used the stings for.  I mean, obviously defense.  But do the Dragons / Angels also use the stings for offense?  In particular, do they use them to aid in predation?

Turns out: yup, they sure do. 

The authors managed to keep a number of Blue Dragons alive in captivity (this is quite difficult, because reasons) and introduced them to various living prey items.  And it turns out the slugs are active predators.  They don’t just gnaw on defenseless jellyfish.  They’ll eat anything they can catch, including other invertebrates — worms, shrimp, whatever — and small fish. 

And “anything they can catch” was a broader category than suspected.  That’s because, if the slug can get close enough, they’ll whip those cerrata around to sting their prey.  And those cerrata have enough nematocysts to instantly paralyze a small animal.  So while the slug isn’t fast, it only needs to land a single touch.  One flick, just a moment of contact, the lightest caress, and that’s the game.

The paper authors watched this play out in real time, repeatedly.  Hence their title: angels with devil hands.


[big hands, I know you’re the one]

— I mentioned that the slugs look this way for a reason.  Well, we can now guess why they have those very long cerrata: they’re weapons.  Longer cerrata give the slow-moving slug a longer reach for hitting prey.

As to the coloration, they float on the ocean surface most of the time.  Hence their pattern of blue, dark blues and whites: they reflect a lot of harmful ultraviolet, and also blend in.  From a distance, a Dragon will look like a small clump of seaweed or a streak of light on the water’s surface.

— Did I mention that they habitually float upside down?  And that they swallow air bubbles for buoyancy, to float effortlessly, but then cough them back up when they want to swim more actively?  Or that they are cheerful and energetic cannibals?  Or that they can regenerate?

Well.  Obviously I like writing these nerdy science posts!  But I do think they connect to the greater CT project: much is known, but there’s so much more yet to know.  And sometimes the moving frontier between between the known and the unknown hits something that’s just cool.

And that’s all.