Learning and working is hard, so why bother, when it’s so easy to fake it? Thanks to generative AI, it has never been easier to pretend to have done some work. But we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the consequences. The honest and the diligent lose out, while the lazy and the dishonest get rewarded. But what are the consequences for society of making things easier for cheats and grifters, and more difficult for the talented and hard-working to be recognised?

Pope Leo XIV recently spoke poetically about the soul crushing effect of replacing human made art with machine-generated AI slop. “Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative”, he told an audience of film makers.

The Vatican has also expressed thoughtful concerns about tools that are primarily useful for fraud. “Much widespread deception is no trivial matter; it strikes at the core of humanity, dismantling the foundational trust on which societies are built.”

A new economics paper from researchers at Ivy League schools Dartmouth College and Princeton called Making Talk Cheap, confirms as much. They examined the consequences of job applicants using AI to help give them a hand. Since it is fundamentally little more than a text generator, AI can churn out professional looking cover letters. But when all applications look the same, employers hire far fewer high-ability workers and more low-ability workers, concludes Dartmouth professor Paul Novosad, commenting on the research.

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