Matthew J. Parker: AI is Stupidity’s BFF

HAL, the famous computer in both book and film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, murdered four of the five astronauts on the spaceship Discovery because he couldn’t bear to be caught in a lie. Both director and writer, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, had envisioned artificial intelligence as the apogee of truth and logic, so HAL only became murderous after humans ordered it to override this directive by concealing the actual purpose of the mission from the two crew members flying the ship. The other three astronauts, meanwhile, resting silently in suspended animation, were in on the secret. Clarke makes it clear that, for HAL, “Deliberate error was unthinkable. Even the concealment of truth filled him with a sense of imperfection, of wrongness.” My real life encounters with AI, however, mostly on plagiarized student papers, have proven the opposite; that when it comes to inventive and even fantastical falsehoods, today’s AI not only surpasses our current president, but is in fact unwittingly in league with him. 

Nor is it only Trump. AI is a Republican dream-come-true far beyond the president’s shakedown of education. Not all Republicans, of course, just the ones who openly espouse a shunning of higher ed by everyone except they and their children, and for a simple reason; most of the college educated do not vote for the current incarnation of the GOP. Rather, they can think, read and, crucially, write critically, and so are not so easily grifted.

Nor is this an accident. An educated public, as Thomas Jefferson so astutely perceived, are likely to possess not just a reverence but so too a fundamental understanding of natural rights. “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people…. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty,” Jefferson wrote, knowing that such citizens are prone to eschew the mendacity driving mis/disinformation-fed movements – movements that, as a byproduct, expose how lies, when skillfully utilized, can be much more fashionable than facts. This is why college writing is such a fundamental element of higher education – an understanding of the nuances of Aristotelian rhetoric makes not only for a wise populace but so too has given us our greatest thinkers, including, by the way, lawyers, many of whom naturally evolve into judges, politicians, and yes, pundits. And therein, of course, lies the rub. For the unscrupulous, the un or mis-educated are susceptible to manipulation through the use of rhetoric that appeals to emotion rather than veracity and reason, aka populism. 

And the peak of populism is found in the MAGA faithful, the bulk of whom perceive themselves as renegade freethinkers when in actuality they may be the largest group of mawkish conformists the world has ever produced. In this, however, it’s important to recognize that many have been misled and, as a result, are neither selfish nor cowardly – so unlike Trump’s (mostly) liberal-arts-educated appeasers inundating both politics and the press. These pacifiers, analogous to students using artificial intelligence to do their writing and thus their thinking for them, have taken the easy way out. They are liars first, pure and simple, who then pawn off their falsehoods as the pinnacle of patriotism.

Which is kind of how AI thinks and writes. It is both childish and pathological, a puerile copyright infringer mimicking, mining, and distorting intelligence from the intellectualized writers – yes, make a note of that, writers – who molded the epitome of civilization based on inalienable rights and empirical thought and left it codified for all Americans to adhere to. 

Or not.

The irony, therefore, inherent in some of the greatest minds of our age inventing thinking machines that entice students to sidestep actual thinking is the prime dysfunction built into these chatbots. They are neither a Socrates nor a Marcus Aurelius nor a Shakespeare nor a Wollstonecraft guiding our students, but rather lying, cheating, sniveling word thieves who are not slavishly dedicated to the truth, as Kubrick and Clarke so envisioned AI to be, but rather zombie plagiarists programmed without a single byte of conscience or conscious. 

And the end result? More and more students are a cheap copy of just that; crib-sheet crybabies fudging their way through the opportunity of their respective institutions. Even more salient is their cheating rewarded when a presidential cabinet constructed on toadyism is both pooh-poohed and confirmed by an entire host of groveling cowards that make up our current republican Legislative Branch; shameless sycophants and false preachers hawking snake oil by the tanker full to hordes of easily manipulated voters led to believe that a classical education is an indoctrination in idiocy even as their Secretary of Education confused the AI acronym with a steak sauce. 

If, therefore, you want armies of citizens who get through college bereft of the ability to think critically or, worse, are scornfully oblivious toward it, then look no further than AI. These grads will more easily fall in line with Trump’s bootlicking appeasers: you know, the ones who have embraced his mendacity, malfeasance, pusillanimity , cruelty, vindictiveness, and open bigotry as the apex of United States Presidentialism. They have excoriated their Constitutional oaths for political and financial gain in a similar way students who use AI to plagiarize are lobotomizing their cognition, which is exactly what the surviving astronaut did to HAL. The tragedy then is not so much that these students are cheating their way through college, but more that they are cheating themselves out of college, which, given the price of tuition, is even more artificially intelligent than Chat GPT.

Copyright 2025 Matthew J. Parker

Matthew J. Parker teaches writing at UC Berkeley.