Hey, AI-nstein!
Doing homework without robot assistance may soon be a relic of the past. A tech company has devised a state-of-the-art AI “homework agent” named Einstein that can automatically complete your assignments for you.
“Einstein has a full virtual computer with a browser — anything you can do, he can do,” the education automator’s creator, Companion.AI, boasts on their website alongside a pic of the tech’s gray-haired namesake.
Indeed, the cutting-edge creation logs onto the learning management database Canvas on the user’s behalf. It then “watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework — automatically,” per the site.
And these essays are apparently not half-baked either. “Give him a reading assignment, and he reads the full text, understands it, and writes original essays with proper citations,” Companion brags. The academic accelerant can also do this for videos by extracting “key concepts” and using them to “answer assignments accurately.”
In doing so, Einstein circumvents the outdated process of copy-pasting answers from ChatGPT, which is not only tedious but can make students susceptible to AI detectors employed by professors. It can even participate in online discussion boards and forums by reading the thread and contributing well-wrought responses.
And no subject is off-limits for this automated jack of all classes, which can ace “math, physics, CS, history, literature, econ” and more, even while you’re asleep.
Indeed, it would appear that the homework bot is a veritable H-bomb in students’ ongoing race to game the system via “machine learning.”
But is Einstein as good as advertised? The techsperts at Futurism had their doubts, noting that the AI industry is fraught with “deceptive claims” and that the homework whiz’s work could be substandard.
In addition, they claimed that the so-called “autonomous” homework process could paradoxically rely on a large human support network.
What is perhaps alarming is how Companion unabashedly promotes the tech’s ability to facilitate cheating in school.
Addressing whether an Einstein user could get busted by professors, Companion wrote, “Einstein submits assignments from your account just like you would. The work is original and generated per-assignment — not copied from a database.
The tech firm noted in the FAQ that students, if presumably struck by a sudden pang of conscience, could still do an assignment themselves by telling “Einstein to skip it.”
“You’re in full control — he only submits what you approve or what you’ve set to auto-submit,” they declared.
The education automation tool had online users raging against the machine. “It’s really sad that somebody would make something like this,” lamented one critic in a Reddit thread, while another rued, “get me off this rock.”
“I wonder if these morons that [sic] use tools like this realize how utterly replaceable they will be in the very near future?” said a third.
“First, the name is just insulting to Einstein,” declared one disillusioned Redditor. “Second, we are so cooked as a society.”
Companion’s founder, Advait Paliwal, defended the tech in a statement to Futurism, claiming that the outrage is “misplaced” because the tool is inevitable. “The education system will need to adapt to AI the same way it adapted to calculators, the internet, and Google,” he declared.
The use of the tech in the classroom has divided people, with some claiming the tech heralds the end of academic integrity while others claim it’s part and parcel of academia in the AI Age.
“Honestly, I’ve never met a student who doesn’t use AI or has never used AI to cheat on an assignment,” said Roy Lee, a former Columbia University student who said he used ChatGPT to write 80% of his college essays, told The Post. “AI is just part of the student workflow now.”
Lee, 21, was later suspended from Columbia for creating a tech to help game job interviews, which prompted him to create Cluely, a startup that claims to help users “cheat on everything.”
According to a scholastic survey of high school and college students, 97% said they’ve used tools like ChatGPT to get ahead at school, while more than 1 in 5 copped to using it to write college or scholarship essays before even setting foot on campus.
