It seemed pretty clear from the get go that Einstein itself was B.S. I did 20 minutes of digging before writing up that post, found Paliwal and recognized an attention flare when I saw one.
"Nuisance" is really helpful way of thinking about some of these applications, maybe even the category as a whole when we think about education. It's a presence that seeks to interfere with the activities and experiences we know to be meaningful. Maintaining that meaning will always be the challenge.
I was skeptical of Einstein from the get-go and once I saw it was basically built on OpenClaw or that OpenClaw was even involved, I didn't pay much attention. The larger issue is if we continue to only focus on the cheating aspect of AI in student hands, we will be in a perpetual technological warfare and no one wins - LMS's try to make their online course material AI proof and students and future "Einsteins" will try to get around it. Part of the problem, of course, is the rise of online work in the first place which, while certainly a part of the landscape prior to the pandemic, has only accelerated since then. I realize how important online courses are to higher education, but from a cost standpoint, any kind of asynchronous work is susceptible to AI, regardless of whether its a full blow agentic tool that does an entire semester's worth of work in one shot. For students who have no intention of doing work for a required course, I don't know what the answer is short of live oral exams at the conclusion of each semester.
I now know too much about the mainstream LLMs to be comfortable using them anymore. The intellectual property theft, environmental costs and exploitative labor practices make it really hard to identify ethical uses. Luke Munn wrote convincingly of "The uselessness of AI ethics" - an article I wish I'd read before spending so much time researching the topic to develop guiding principles for our college (https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00209-w). The companies are wildly irresponsible, but at least they monitor their creations. Having random users setting their free 'clawbots' loose on the internet is just...I mean, that is a supervillain plot, not a productivity enhancer.
There are LLMs trained on ethically sourced data, using locally sourced power and with grad students doing the quality control (whether grad students are exploited is not an issue I have the capacity to consider atm). If there are useful products based on these models I don't know where to find them, much less how to persuade students to use them instead of ChatGPT. I've found uses for LLMs that I value, but not enough to learn how to install experimental software on a dedicated computer with new profiles and accounts, firewalled off from the rest of my network.
Thank you for this. I had read about Einstein and, as an online teacher, I was seriously annoyed. I had never heard of OpenClaw and now I know how much I have to learn about the different algorithms under the Ai umbrella. So, you have soothed one area of concern and also given me something new and interesting to learn about! Thanks again
While Einstein might be a joke, as was Moonbeam before it... there are loads of AI writers (LLMs wrapped in new essay-mill-esque websites) like Moonbeam that persist and probably make enough money: in aggregate they get ~6x the traffic of all essay mills (so they might be wrappers, but they still make money) suggesting that these business models are sustainable.
It seemed pretty clear from the get go that Einstein itself was B.S. I did 20 minutes of digging before writing up that post, found Paliwal and recognized an attention flare when I saw one.
"Nuisance" is really helpful way of thinking about some of these applications, maybe even the category as a whole when we think about education. It's a presence that seeks to interfere with the activities and experiences we know to be meaningful. Maintaining that meaning will always be the challenge.
I was skeptical of Einstein from the get-go and once I saw it was basically built on OpenClaw or that OpenClaw was even involved, I didn't pay much attention. The larger issue is if we continue to only focus on the cheating aspect of AI in student hands, we will be in a perpetual technological warfare and no one wins - LMS's try to make their online course material AI proof and students and future "Einsteins" will try to get around it. Part of the problem, of course, is the rise of online work in the first place which, while certainly a part of the landscape prior to the pandemic, has only accelerated since then. I realize how important online courses are to higher education, but from a cost standpoint, any kind of asynchronous work is susceptible to AI, regardless of whether its a full blow agentic tool that does an entire semester's worth of work in one shot. For students who have no intention of doing work for a required course, I don't know what the answer is short of live oral exams at the conclusion of each semester.
I now know too much about the mainstream LLMs to be comfortable using them anymore. The intellectual property theft, environmental costs and exploitative labor practices make it really hard to identify ethical uses. Luke Munn wrote convincingly of "The uselessness of AI ethics" - an article I wish I'd read before spending so much time researching the topic to develop guiding principles for our college (https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00209-w). The companies are wildly irresponsible, but at least they monitor their creations. Having random users setting their free 'clawbots' loose on the internet is just...I mean, that is a supervillain plot, not a productivity enhancer.
There are LLMs trained on ethically sourced data, using locally sourced power and with grad students doing the quality control (whether grad students are exploited is not an issue I have the capacity to consider atm). If there are useful products based on these models I don't know where to find them, much less how to persuade students to use them instead of ChatGPT. I've found uses for LLMs that I value, but not enough to learn how to install experimental software on a dedicated computer with new profiles and accounts, firewalled off from the rest of my network.
It doesn't help that our government is trying to bully the companies into letting them create Big Brother and his Killer Robots https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/27/defense-anthropic-ai-war-risks-hegseth-amodei.html
I don't "heart" the tech, to be clear. Your perspective, yes.
This below is steps further…but same general problem.
https://www.404media.co/metas-ai-patent-to-simulate-dead-people-shows-the-dangers-of-spectral-labor/?ref=weekly-roundup-newsletter
Thank you for this. I had read about Einstein and, as an online teacher, I was seriously annoyed. I had never heard of OpenClaw and now I know how much I have to learn about the different algorithms under the Ai umbrella. So, you have soothed one area of concern and also given me something new and interesting to learn about! Thanks again
While Einstein might be a joke, as was Moonbeam before it... there are loads of AI writers (LLMs wrapped in new essay-mill-esque websites) like Moonbeam that persist and probably make enough money: in aggregate they get ~6x the traffic of all essay mills (so they might be wrappers, but they still make money) suggesting that these business models are sustainable.
Expect more Einsteins
https://thisisntfine.substack.com/p/essay-mill-industry-web-traffic-update-f78