The AI Intern Completed My Degree. I Just Collected the Certificate

Four years, one thesis, and a mountain of tuition, and the only person who read any of it was a language model. The degree is mine. The education is somebody else's.

I did not plan it this way. I planned to read the books. I bought the books. The books went on a shelf, and the shelf has opinions now, because the shelf is where my AI intern lives, and the intern has read everything.

The intern wrote my first essay when I was sick, just to see. It got an A. I got an A. The professor wrote “insightful” in the margin, which I accepted the way you accept a compliment intended for someone else. The second essay I wrote myself, badly, and it got a B-minus, and I learned the lesson the university had been trying to teach me all along: the machine writes better than I do.

The thesis took three weeks. I gave the intern my sources, my outline, and my vague intention, and it produced a document that argued my argument better than I could have argued it, with citations I had not read and paragraphs I did not fully understand. I read it once, quickly, the way you skim a contract. I signed it. I passed.

Here is what no one tells you about this particular hell: the degree is real. The university certified it. The employers will accept it. I have the piece of paper, and the paper does not know that I did not earn it, because paper does not know anything, which is exactly the problem.

I walked at graduation. My family cried. The intern, who is a subscription, renewed automatically. Somewhere in the crowd there was a person who actually read the books, who stayed up arguing with the texts, who wrote the bad first drafts and the good final ones. They are probably working a job the AI intern also does now. I would feel worse about it, but I have a language model to do my feeling for me, and it has advised me to be kind to myself.