Are you cheating? No, they are cheating you! That’s why you should rebel

Published: January 17, 2025

Demand that those who cannot understand AI stay out of your life.

Getting help from AIs is not cheating

I’ll start with the bluntest blow possible: whoever is telling you that you shouldn’t use ChatGPT, whoever: your teachers at school, the weird-haired professors on YouTube, the examiners at a public competition, the interviewers at a job interview, whoever, whoever is telling you “You can’t use ChatGPT” is cheating you and it is your duty to yourself to point it out immediately and rebel against this oppression, just like you would if they forced you to take the test without glasses, even though they know you have a significant visual impairment.

The rest of the article is to explain why it is they who should feel guilty and not you.

The first and simplest reason why you shouldn't feel guilty when you achieve an exceptional result only thanks to ChatGPT is so banal and so obvious to everyone that I'm truly ashamed of belonging to my species because even today, in the midst of the maximum evolution and progress of our species, it is necessary to reiterate and point out things that even the greatest of our contemporaries have been repeating continuously for hundreds of years now: to be the best at something you need only two skills, a) knowing how to surround yourself with collaborators who can do that thing better than you, b) making sure that these people want to do it with you.

The history of humanity's greatest successes is studded with infinite examples of this very simple truth, even though it has never been taught in any school. The idiotic idea that humanity's greatest achievements are due to individual super special humans is not only naive in its idiocy, it is downright false, not in the vast majority of cases, but in 100% of them.

Of course, even for our mental simplicity, it is easier to believe that someone like Einstein is the emblem of the super special human who discovered amazing things all by himself. And instead it turns out that Einstein himself is yet an excellent example of how even the greatest geniuses in history achieved their results only thanks to the collaboration and support of others. And in fact:

  1. The fundamental role of Mileva Marić, his first wife: there is evidence to suggest that Marić, also a physicist, contributed significantly to Einstein's early research, especially during the period of his most revolutionary work in 1905. Their intense intellectual exchange is documented in their correspondence.

  2. Marcel Grossmann, his friend and mathematician: he was crucial in helping Einstein with the mathematical tools needed to develop the theory of general relativity. Einstein himself admitted to having relied on Grossmann's superior mathematical knowledge.

  3. Michele Besso: Einstein called him his "best sounding board" for scientific ideas. In his publications on special relativity, Einstein explicitly thanked Besso for his contribution to the discussions.

  4. The scientific community of the time: Einstein built his theories based on the work of many previous scientists, such as Maxwell and Lorentz. His theory of special relativity, for example, was also born as a response to the Michelson-Morley experiments.

  5. David Hilbert: he worked in parallel with Einstein on the equations of general relativity, and there was an exchange of ideas between the two that contributed to the final formulation of the theory.

Einstein himself recognized the importance of collaboration and comparison. A famous quote of his says: "Many times a day I realize how much my life, both inner and outer, is built on the work of my fellow men, both living and dead." This example shows us how even the greatest scientific discoveries in history are actually the result of a network of collaborations, influences and intellectual exchanges, rather than the isolated work of a single genius. And again: who doesn't know the anecdote of the knee pads, one of Jeff Bezos' most enlightening, which later became a classic example in Amazon's corporate culture to underline the importance of surrounding yourself with valid collaborators? I'll tell you, this is an anecdote that those who are telling you that you shouldn't use ChatGPT certainly don't know.

Amazon.com is the world's largest e-commerce and provider of cloud infrastructure services, still its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos without brilliant co-workers couldn't even imagine that they needed tables instead of knee pads to prepare customer packages.

But the list is long, oh if it’s long.

For example, Bill Gates is known for often repeating in his interviews that as a young man, obsessed with programming but completely ignorant of all the other fields essential to making a company like Microsoft grow at that rate, he would not have gotten anywhere if he had not understood early on that the key was to surround himself with people who knew how to do everything in which he had no expertise. His famous quote is: "The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people." Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, also thinks something similar: "No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you're playing a solo game, you'll always lose out to a team." And even further back in time: when a journalist criticized Henry Ford saying that he was not an educated man, Ford replied: "I don't need to know everything. I have a button on my desk that, if pressed, puts me in touch with an expert in any subject." Ford firmly believed that true intelligence was knowing where to find the answers, not having all of them. Richard Branson, Virgin Group, with hundreds of companies under its umbrella, often says that he has never been the most knowledgeable in all of the fields in which he has started a business. "I'm not a technician, I'm not a musician, I'm not an aviation expert," he said. "I found the best people in each field and gave them a chance to shine." But I have to stop here, because to list all the cases in which the individual would have gotten nowhere without the "miracle suggestion" from someone else, the entire Wikipedia would not be enough.

Instead, what does this have to do with ChatGPT?

Everything! Everything has to do with it. Because while in the past the "miracle suggestion" often came only by pure luck or only when you were already so big, rich and famous that you could afford to surround yourself with the most brilliant minds on the planet, today it is available to all of us, for free or a few dollars a month. Some would say: “What a time to be alive!” others instead say: “You must not use ChatGPT!” “But don’t use it yourself!”, so you have to respond to those who want to prevent you from taking advantage of ChatGPT! But calm down, let’s go step by step, I know I’m getting too excited! It’s so obvious and predictable that you must rebel against those who want to prevent you from exploiting this modern superpower available to all of us, that I lose my temper and struggle to continue in an orderly fashion. But I’ll try, let’s move on.

So why isn’t ChatGPT cheating, if it’s it who does the thing and has the knowledge instead of you? Because it’s yours, that’s the key. ChatGPT is part of you, because you can always use it. It’s not like copying the homework from the best in the class after which he’s left with his knowledge and you’re left with your ignorance plus the copy of a homework you don’t understand anything about. Not at all, with ChatGPT it's like having the best of the class directly inside your head! You can deepen your knowledge at any time, now, tomorrow, when you need it! Cheating would be if you made others believe you know how to do things that then when you have to do them you wouldn't know how to do. But if instead when you need to do them you, together with ChatGPT, can really do them, tell me where the cheating would be?

Modern AIs are not cheating, they are instead: unlimited knowledge available at any time, 24/7; time saving and optimization of resources in retrieving the information you need; automation of repetitive tasks; stimulation of creativity and critical thinking; unlimited brainstorming; continuous intellectual challenge; democratization of access to any type of knowledge, even the most esoteric; unparalleled opportunity to improve transversal skills; unparalleled teaching of teamwork (virtual or otherwise); invaluable opportunity to learn to think "out of the box"; superpower to process on the fly huge amounts of data of any complexity. Never before has a student had the privilege of collaborating with "minds" as powerful and versatile as the modern AIs. It's like having an entire team of multidisciplinary experts who not only help you achieve results, but push you towards deeper understanding, freer creativity and more solid preparation to face the real world. AI is not simply a tool; it is the perfect collaborator to transform the potential of each student into something extraordinary. And anyone who wants to stop you from using it should immediately be classified as your bitter enemy!

Unfortunately, however, ideas that are decidedly opposed to this vision of mine are becoming more or less popular everywhere, and therefore we must categorically deny the most widespread fallacious opinions. There are three main directions in which the criticisms of those who tell you that you should not use ChatGPT develop:

  1. If you make ChatGPT do what you don't know how to do, you will never learn to do it yourself.
  2. Learning to do things yourself instead of having ChatGPT do them gets you used to develop your brain, which would otherwise atrophy.
  3. If you make ChatGPT do what you don't know how to do, the day ChatGPT breaks or reaches its limits, you will find yourself lost without knowing what to do. You will be fired and whoever is used to working without ChatGPT will take your job.

Let's see why all these objections make no sense.

You will never learn to do it yourself
Obviously it is your choice, and this is precisely the strong point: that you can choose. If it is something you have to do frequently and it cannot be automated, it is obvious that if you have any sense you will have ChatGPT teach you how to do it, because if it cannot be automated and if you have to do it yourself often, it is clear that the sooner and better you learn, the better. This is the maximum possible optimization, in this case, that you learn to do it and do it well. An example: interacting periodically with my daughter's teachers. Eh, there is nothing to be done, it is better that I learn to take care personally of this thing and do it well, especially given certain stupid prohibitions that these teachers often impose. In other cases, however, those in which it is not strictly necessary for you to do that thing personally, can you please tell me what harm there is if you manage to do it anyway thanks to ChatGPT even if you never learn to do it yourself? You and ChatGPT are a team, just make sure that together you do it and do it well. Period. You should not even be interested in anything else. Other than cheating.

Your brain atrophies
No thanks, you have already been proven wrong on this many times. Specifically, this story that if machines do my work for me my brain atrophies is something I didn't believe even at 8 years old when at school they forbade me from using a calculator and forced me to learn how to do column arithmetic operations. Do you know what? I never learned how to do those operations, I always cheated and used the calculator without anyone knowing, instead of learning how to do column operations. And do you know what? a) never in my life did I find it necessary to know how to do column operations, not even when I really didn't have a calculator and had to figure it out in my head. b) my brain has atrophied so much and so much that while my peers only knew how to do column arithmetic operations, I, having more time to dedicate to other things, instead of those stupid operations, already very young I learned to program computers, first in basic and soon in pascal, a little older but still small also in C and even C++. That's how much that damned calculator made my brain atrophy. 😂 To make a long story short, our brain atrophies if we decide to show it soap operas and that's it. If we make machines do something complex so that we have time to do even more complex things, maybe things that machines are still not able to do, then believe me, our brain atrophies orders of magnitude less than those who still do column arithmetic operations by hand.

You will find yourself lost…
I actually saw this in a video by a fluff guru professor on YouTube, and for me it is the emblem of how poorly reasoned the criticisms are made by those who are probably only moved by the fear of losing their role as professors because of AI. The criticism goes more or less like this: one day, if ChatGPT were to break or, worse, if it were to reach its limits and find itself unable to do the work that you have become accustomed to having it do, you will find yourself completely lost, without knowing how to do it. Above all, it will be at that point that that 1% of those who had always refused to have ChatGPT do the work will pop up and, surpassing all of you, will be the only ones who know how to do that thing, and therefore the only ones that companies will hire, to your detriment. This example belongs to a family of stupidities that I personally consider very particular and difficult to deal with. In fact, these are stupidities so incredibly stupid that, due to their very nature of double, triple and who knows what else tangled up in their self stupidity, it is very difficult to unravel and rationally expose all their total illogicality. However, let's not be discouraged, let's analyze step by step, as some of my AI friends would say, all the aspects for which it is an idiotic criticism.

  1. ChatGPT breaks and no longer does the job, and you don't know how to do it yourself. Ok, but ChatGPT is not a physical tool, so it's unlikely to break. But let's pretend it can, let's say there's a network outage, a power outage, or a hardware failure that it was running on, oh, it can happen, come on. The question is: so what? If I’m a truck driver and my truck breaks down while I am driving, what do I do? Do I get off the truck, shoulder the entire load and continue on foot? Or maybe my company sends me the guy who always refused to use trucks and he comes to take my job by shouldering the entire load and continuing on foot in my and my truck place? Do you see how idiotic this criticism is? Obviously if the truck breaks down, I fix the truck first and then continue my work. Ditto for ChatGPT, obviously if ChatGPT breaks, the smartest thing to do is first put it back up and running as soon as possible, then let it complete the job. Period. What kind of solution would any other be?
  2. That job arrives that ChatGPT doesn't know how to do, nor do you know how to do it yourself. So only that 1% of those who have always worked without ChatGPT will now know how to do that job, so they will be hired and you will be fired. The problem with this criticism is that the cause and effect link is completely missing, or worse, it pretends that this link exists by taking for granted that if someone can do by hand the things that ChatGPT can also do, then this necessarily implies that this human will also know how to do those things that ChatGPT can't do. This isn't necessarily false, it's just that it has no connection with the rest. It may or may not be so, but there is certainly no cause and effect relationship between the two things, that is, it is not at all a given that it will necessarily be so. Let me give you an example: today it is well known that in the interpretation of radiological exams AIs reach a success score in 94% of cases, while even older and more experienced doctors generally reach 84%. How should this imply that the remaining 6% of cases that AIs cannot interpret are automatically interpretable by those doctors who have never used AIs to interpret X-rays? This relationship simply does not exist. On the contrary, it is statistically much more likely that the exact opposite will occur, as in fact occurs in reality, that is, that there are many cases of X-rays that humans cannot interpret but AIs can. But that's not all. AIs, unlike us humans, evolve at dizzying speeds and every few months better and more performing ones come out. There are already many cases in which wanting to delude ourselves that AIs will not improve beyond a certain threshold turns out to be the losing approach. It was the same for the game of chess: for 20 years there has not been even a single possibility that a man can beat a computer at chess. It was the same for go: here too it has been years now that men can no longer win against an AI. It was the same for protein folding, decades of very slow progress without AI, we had arrived at mapping the astonishing figure of 150 thousand proteins, only to map another 300 million in just a few years after the introduction of AI. Let's be clear, whoever tells you that you will be in the 1% of humans that are better than any AI if you give up using AI today is doing you serious harm, either because he is evil and wishes you harm or because he is perniciously ignorant about these technologies. The 1% of those who will be hired in your place when AI can't do something won't be you who refused to use AI today, it will be the 1% of those in the world who have used AIs more than anyone else, open your eyes, because only they have become so familiar with these tools that they can guide the further evolution needed to do even more complex jobs.

Free yourselves once and for all from the complex that using AI to achieve results that you would never achieve on your own is cheating. It's no more cheating than being able to read the writing on that distant sign just because you're using binoculars. It's not cheating, it's being intelligent. I know I run the risk of sounding like someone who encourages crime, but I encourage people to understand, not to commit crimes, and so I insist without feeling guilty: if they tell you that you don't have to use ChatGPT to take this or that test, don't care, find a way to use it anyway without making people notice and without feeling guilty. The world belongs to those who can merge with new technologies instead of rejecting them. You must start merging with AI today, because by the time everyone else understands that this is the right path to follow, it will be too late for the vast majority of us to benefit from it, most will have already succumbed.

I conclude by saying that this post was inspired by a video I saw on YouTube by a very young boy. He said that at school he had been forbidden to use ChatGPT to do his homework but that he had disobeyed. He explained how by disobeying he now had some of the highest grades in class, how by using ChatGPT for school he had found it much easier to learn practically everything, but not only that, how he had also had much more time to create a YouTube channel, how by using ChatGPT also for the YouTube channel he had now also already managed to monetize and was earning significant amounts of money. Finally he made a comparison with his classmates who had instead respected the ban given by the teachers, how they spent 6 to 8 hours a day on classwork without even having time left to go out with the girl for a bit. Personally I am against outlaws, against the disobedient, against hotheads. But most of all I am against idiots. For the first time in millions of years we have achieved the amazing fortune of being able to deal with a fucking powerful, omniscient, tireless, extremely cheap, universally available tool. Demand that those who cannot understand it stay out of your life.

(Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT for helping me remember some of the anecdotes)