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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cheating in school isn’t new. But with AI making it easier than ever, teachers face a new challenge: where to draw the line and how to make sure students are still learning. In this episode, we’ll take a look at three different approaches educators are adopting to deal with AI in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First, Morgan sits down with Max Spero, CEO and co-founder of the AI detection company Pangram Labs, to discuss how detection tools should, and should not, be used in the classroom. Then, we hear from KQED reporter Marlena Jackson Retondo about the return of the iconic “blue books,” and the benefits of “analog” learning. Finally, Morgan calls up her cousin, Jeremy Na, who happens to be an English teacher in San Jose. He explains how he adapted his teaching style to focus on the process of learning, rather than a final grade — and why his method has kept AI out of his classroom (for the most part).\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC8041204001\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jeremy Na, Bay Area-based educator\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pangram.com/about-us\">Max Spero\u003c/a>, founder of Pangram Labs \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/mjacksonretondo\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Marlena Jackson-Retondo\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, engagement producer and reporter for KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – James D. Walsh, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NYMag\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64992/taking-exams-in-blue-books-its-back-to-help-curb-ai-use-and-rampant-cheating\">Taking Exams in Blue Books? They’re Back to Help Curb AI Use and Rampant Cheating\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> –\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Marlena Jackson Retondo\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, \u003ci>KQED’s Mindshift\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/chatgpt-ai-cheating-college-blue-books-5e3014a6\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">– Ben Cohen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Wall Street Journal \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are your thoughts on, on generative AI? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Generative AI is a fancy autocomplete, in my opinion. Trusting it is no different than trusting a magic 8-ball. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jeremy Na is a Bay Area High School English teacher. He’s a great teacher, and I know this because he’s my older cousin, and he spent a lot of his teenage years at my parents’ dining table as my math tutor. Let’s just say I wasn’t the most cooperative student. One of the first hurdles of his teaching career was probably getting me to understand basic algebra. The second, getting me to actually sit down and do my math homework. And now, like many teachers, he faces another challenge: AI in the classroom. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When my students tell me a lot about how they trust AI answers and stuff like that, I reference the SpongeBob episode where, you know, everyone in Bikini Bottom is trusting a magic conch shell to give them answers and decide their life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh magic conch shell, what do we need to do to get out of the kelp forest? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nothing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The shell has spoken! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think it’s a big scam. Or rather, I know it’s big scam because, you know, it just sucks up money and is burning the environment for nothing. That’s my personal view of generative AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So yeah, my cousin Jeremy, not a fan of AI. In recent years, the use of AI tools has been a major point of contention between students and teachers. Scroll through any social media platform and you’ll see students give tips for getting away with submitting AI essays. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I use ChatGPT, but this is the way to use ChatGPT and not get flagged for any plagiarism or anything like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Teachers fretting about their students’ dependence on AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a nightmare that is destroying learning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are the students who don’t use AI but get dragged in anyway. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was falsely accused of using AI on my final paper last term, it was flagged as 60% AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In his nine years of teaching, my cousin Jeremy has seen his fair share of cheating attempts. His students have used ChatGBT since it launched about three years ago. But he quickly realized that his students were using it for more than just an academic shortcut. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were asking me stuff like, Mr. Na, uh, how can I use AI to help me with this assignment? Or Mr. Na, you know, I was using AI the other day and it really helped me with X, Y, Z problem. At first, I thought these students were just kinda trolling cause like I thought to myself, there’s no way anyone would trust AI. This is the machines that like tell people to staple cheese to pizza to make it stick better. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Google AI actually recommended adding glue to pizza, but his point still stands. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But no, I realized soon enough that my students were like serious about trusting AI. And that’s when I realized, oh, my students, you know, they’ve fallen for the propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s still no consensus on the role of AI in education. Some teachers embrace it as a feature of their lesson plans. Others ban it from their classrooms entirely and blame AI for their students’ atrophied critical thinking skills. And at the center of this debate is a question that’s haunted educators throughout human history. What do we do about cheating? Now that everyone can carry little AI cheating machines in their pockets, AKA their phones, that debate has kicked into overdrive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s episode is a little different, because instead of following one thread, this internet rabbit hole will take us down a few different paths. We’re going to look at three different approaches to curbing AI cheating in school. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back when the internet was brand new, students suddenly had access to a virtually endless trove of information to copy and paste from. Academics needed a way to tell what was original and what was copied. So plagiarism detection was born. An entire industry dedicated to identifying and flagging stolen work. But with generative AI blowing up, checking for plagiarism isn’t enough. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First up, a new tab. What’s up with AI detection? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To get into this, I called up Max Spero, co-founder and self-described chief slop janitor of Pangram Labs. Pangram is an AI detection tool that flags texts generated by all the major models like ChatGBT and Claude and Grok, and also detects AI-generated edits from tools like Grammarly. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It could be an essay, it could be a review, it could a social media post. And then so we help people tell you like, yeah, what’s AI and what’s human. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cleaning up the slop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cleaning up the slop as they say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slop is the colloquial term for that low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. Pangram didn’t start out as an educational tool. Max said that the company’s first customers were actually websites trying to detect and delete fake reviews. Pangram offered a free trial version of the tool on its website. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then we were looking at the signups and we kept on seeing signups from like EDU addresses, people who are putting in what’s clearly student papers and people are doing this like at huge volumes. They’re just pasting in like dozens of papers a day. And then, so I think we were realizing like, hey, there’s a much bigger market here on this consumer side as well, where we can help teachers out because this is clearly a big need. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pangram’s detection works by showing its model two writing samples. The first, written by a human, and the second, similar but AI-generated. They do this over and over and again. The model learns to recognize the way humans write, and distinguish it from AI trying to replicate it. That’s how certain sentence structures or words like “delve” and “rich cultural tapestry”, or even, my beloved em-dash, became associated with AI writing. Humans use all of those features in writing, but AI models overuse them. They’re predictable. There’s a misconception that students can bypass detection tools by paraphrasing AI-generated writing. That may have been the case a few years ago, but detection tools are getting better. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We found that you need to rewrite at least 30% to 40% of some text before it’ll come back as human written. So you really have to like rewrite a large portion of the text before you’re able to erase these signs of AI writing. At that point, you might as well just write your essay yourself. But in the end, like all of these tools, at Pangram and other AI detectors, we can still train on these, the outputs of these tools, so we can detect, not only does this look AI generated, but it also looks like it was run through a humanizer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a program that rewrites AI-generated text to sound more, well, human. And of course, humanizers use AI to do that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s even more clearly a sign of acting in bad faith. Like this is a clear indication that no, you didn’t just like misunderstand that you weren’t allowed to use ChatGPT, but like you actually were actively cheating here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s not impossible to bypass AI detection, but Max said that many AI detectors, including Pangram, can still flag humanized text as AI. He added that since these students are often trying to take the path of least resistance, the threat of detection could be enough to deter cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adding a little bit of friction here goes a long way to helping put down these guardrails and say like, okay, fine, you know, if it’s not really easy for me to just use AI to generate my assignment, I’ll just do it myself. It’s not that bad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some teachers have tried to AI-proof their assignments by adding a random prompt in white text, like “mention bananas in every paragraph.” The human eye can’t see the white text on a white digital background. If a student copies and pastes it into ChatGPT, they’ll get a generated essay that has nothing to do with the actual assignment, but a lot to do with bananas. It’s a dead giveaway that they used AI to complete the paper. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s also some confusion over what detection scores mean. A score of 60% doesn’t mean that 60% of the essay is AI-generated, it’s a confidence score. It means that the detection tool is 60% certain that the text it analyzed is AI generated, which is pretty far from certain. That’s why students who wrote completely original papers have been accused of cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These AI-proofing hacks and the knee-jerk reaction to accuse students of using AI without hearing them out says a lot about the relationship between students and teachers right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think there’s a big problem in trust right now in education, especially because, um, the nature of it is so adversarial. I think like we really need to take a step back and realize that we have a shared goal. The goal is to get the student to learn. And I think a lot of this starts with like how we understand assignments. Like, teachers need to be very clear to students like, hey, these are the guardrails. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like you can use AI, for example, to do brainstorming or an outline, but don’t use AI to fully produce your assignment. Um, and similarly, once the student has like a very clear understanding of like, these are the guidelines, this is what I can and can’t do, um, then it’s easier for them to work together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What’s your stance on teachers using Pangram to grade? Are AI detection tools like the end all be all? Can teachers rely on it completely? How do you best see Pangram being used in the grading process? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like really only the start. It is best used as a smoke detector to tell you, hey, something’s wrong. I should look into what’s going on here. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say like, hey, this AI detector flagged your work as AI, so I’m gonna give you a zero and then just like move on. I think that’s, that’s lazy and that doesn’t really turn the opportunity into a teaching moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Detection tools are just one part of a holistic grading process. Max added that some teachers integrate AI detection into their classroom platforms so that students can check themselves before they turn in their assignments. But other teachers are taking a wildly different approach. Instead of leaning into detection, they’re going back to the olden days. We’ll dive into the return of handwriting after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Let’s take a look at the next strategy teachers have employed to hold the line against AI. If you were in college before the pandemic started, you might remember this vintage classic. Okay, new tab. Back to blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My colleague, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, is joining us for this part of our deep dive. Marlena has been reporting on AI and K through 12 education for MindShift, another KQED podcast about the future of learning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I guess now we can say that blue books are an old-fashioned, in quotes, tool that, um, a lot of professors and high school teachers use to test students. And they’re used for a lot midterms and finals, and are an alternative to now what we know as, you know, digital testing tools. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve used blue books. You’ve used blue books. I feel like it wasn’t that long ago that we were using blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re not that old. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blue books are exactly what they sound like. They’re little booklets with a baby blue cover and lined paper. They’ve been around since the 1920s and they’ve been a staple of written exams in high school and college. I still remember the absolute horror I felt my junior year of college when my pen exploded just as I finished my constitutional law final and I had to turn in a blue book covered in purple ink. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But blue books were phased out when the pandemic shut down schools in 2020. Everything involved in learning, from lessons to homework to exams, took place online. And then, late last year, Marlena saw a viral post from Jason Coupe, a professor in Atlanta. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he was talking about using blue books, bringing them back to the classroom for his first midterm of that school year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you talk about his reasoning behind moving to blue books? How did other teachers react to that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He and a couple other professors in his department got together and discussed ways to mitigate cheating, use of AI, and also to reengage their students. When we spoke last year, there was a lot of discussion about really getting students to think on their feet, think critically, respond to questions in ways that they might in the real world. And he wasn’t seeing a lot of that in digital exams. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this wasn’t just about cheating. It wasn’t just about AI. There was also that sense of reconnecting the students to the coursework. And it was a learning curve for a lot of students, um, as I’ve heard from multiple professors, but it went well, and a lot of folks will continue to, to use these blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By 2024, you know, this is a generation of students that have spent at least four years, you know, learning digitally in some capacity. How did they respond to having to go back to handwriting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, so a lot of Coupe’s students didn’t know what a blue book was. They had never taken a handwritten exam. They didn’t what to do with the blue book, where to write their name. So he had to teach them. And I remember him saying that it reminded him of his time in teaching in elementary school, um, having to really break down certain processes for students. But, you know, they learned, they took the exam by hand, and he and other professors noticed a difference right away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aside from deterring cheating, how else does prioritizing handwritten notes impact learning? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The research on handwriting is actually really interesting. I spoke with Sophia Vinci-Booher out of Vanderbilt University. She talked to me about handwriting in a really interesting way in that it creates these neural connections to what you’re learning. And this is what she called the visual motor learning system. So it’s combining these two systems, the motor system of handwriting and the visuals of learning something that might be written on the board or a PowerPoint, and it’s combining them and it’s reinforcing what you’re learning when you’re writing by hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s been shown that the mode of taking notes, when it correlates with the mode of having to recall that information, like taking an exam. When those modes are synced, so let’s say there’s a student who takes notes by hand, and then they have to go and take an exam on a blue book, the recall is better that way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So essentially, students are “learning more”, that’s in big quotes, because obviously there are other factors involved in learning. But there’s better learning happening when the mode of note taking and recalling those notes is the same. So, you know, I think there’s a lot more research to look at and to be done, but there are certain benefits to writing by hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And blue books are hot again. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that blue book sales were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and almost 50% at the University of Florida. At UC Berkeley, blue book sales shot up 80% over the past two years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course, this return to our roots has its limits. Blue books are great for exams, but they’re not a realistic option for longer assignments like research papers. And neither approach we’ve covered so far, AI detection and blue books, addresses the core reasons students cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s look at one final strategy in a new tab. The testmaxxing problem. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s go back to my cousin, Jeremy, who’s a high school English teacher in the Bay Area. We both grew up in New York City and went to very academically rigorous public high schools. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The standards of the time, this was in, you know, the early 2000s, was very much, let’s call it testmaxxing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In gaming, there’s this practice called minmaxxing — maximizing your stats with a minimal amount of effort. On the internet, adding maxing to the end of any word is kind of like a joke about optimizing. So by test maxing, Jeremy is referring to the way that students are encouraged to shape their whole approach to school around succeeding on tests instead of actually learning. He believes that’s the reason students cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, when I became a teacher, I set out to make sure that like no one else has that same experience as I did that, you know, students don’t have this miserable high school experience where they’re treated like cattle, basically. Like you gotta you gotta get those numbers up. Your entire worth is decided by these numbers. Our society has placed a lot of importance on the end result of education rather than like education itself. What I mean by that is it’s more important what grade you get on the test than what you learned through the process before taking the test. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To counter the pressure of testmaxxing, Jeremy does things differently in his classroom. He never assigns homework. All the work, including reading and writing assignments, is done in the classroom. He does assign long-term projects, like essays, but he has his own way of AI-proofing them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This methodology, this pedagogy that I’ve developed is developed from shifting priorities away from the end result over into focusing on the process, right? So the fact that it’s inconvenient to use AI was just kind of like a happy little bonus. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He really does make it inconvenient to cheat in his classes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, I don’t see a lot of AI usage. It’s always like one or two out of my 150 students. And the reason I don’t see a lof of AI usage is because when we’re doing it, a long-term assignment like an essay, I make sure to break down that assignment into as many granular pieces as possible. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for example, with my freshmen, ninth graders, when we were doing an essay I’ll often walk them through, not only like how to construct each paragraph, but how to construct like the parts of each paragraph. Like sometimes we’ll go sentence by sentence. In that scenario it would be kind of absurd to use AI, right? Because like Mr. Na is telling you, okay, write one sentence about your opinion on this part of the book, right. Why, why would you go ask Grok or ChatGPT opinion about the book when you can just write your own opinion in one sentence. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is your classroom AI policy, even though, you know, you personally despise AI? Like do you use a detection tool for your students? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t use detection tools at all. I would not trust AI to tell me what the weather is. Why would I trust it to read student reports and, you know, analyze them? That’s absurd. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite his evident disdain for generative AI, my cousin doesn’t have the same zero tolerance policy that a lot of other teachers have. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t explicitly call out their paper for being AI. But what I will do is, you know, I’ll sit with them and be like, “You know, this, this paper’s got a lot of problems. This assignment that you wrote has lots of problems, like it’s, it’s overflowing with problems. I got to sit you down here and we got to talk for like 15 minutes. Sentence by sentence and deconstruct this essay to fix it.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like in that scenario, students do learn like what’s wrong with using AI. Conceivably, they could learn to cheat better this way, but in my view, what they’re actually learning is that the assignment I’m asking them to do is not something outside of their capabilities. So yes, they are learning what the flaws of AI are, but they’re also learning that they are more capable than they might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Telling a teenager not to do something never works. Yeah. If you want a teenager to do something, right? If you want that horse to drink that water, you gotta make the water appealing. You gotta explain why it’s in their best interests not to so, right? They gotta come to that conclusion on their own. The downside is that this process takes a lot of time. So yes, I don’t get through many bucks throughout the school year, but I feel like the quality of the work and the learning that students receive is a lot better for that sacrifice. And I’m willing, I’m, I am willing to make that sacrifice \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like on Reddit, I’m always seeing teachers and professors talk about the ways that they AI-proof their assignments, like adding white text to trip up the prompts or splitting up instructions into multiple documents so it’s really inconvenient to give it to ChatGPT. Have you and your colleagues tried any of these? What do you think about these, like, AI-proofing tricks? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think getting into a arms race with AI is unhelpful. So coming up with different ways to detect AI, and then AI comes up with ways of getting around that, you know, this arms race that you’re describing, I don’t see a point to engaging with it. If you want students to stop using AI, you got to address the core issue, right, rather than just constantly dealing with these symptoms like some absurd game of whack-a-mole. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As you might be able to tell, Jeremy feels pretty strongly about this. He believes that putting so much value on the final product, whether a final paper or a final test score, deprioritizes actual learning, overwhelms students, and incentivizes cheating. Still, he has to teach within the system that values end results. His students still have to take California’s standardized tests. But he said that prepping them for the annual state assessments doesn’t take that much time. For the rest of the school year, he can focus on breaking down assignments and, through that, developing their critical thinking skills. It’s not that grades don’t matter, but by focusing on actual learning, students feel less pressure to cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone is telling them to participate in this rat race, that they have to. That they have no choice but to participate in this rat race to climb to the top, you know. If they are learning, right? I tell students not to deride all of their self-worth from the numbers they get at school. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like the larger question we’re trying to answer throughout the episode is how do you maintain that sense of trust between students and teachers when generative AI tools makes cheating so easy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think, say that like trust between student and teacher has eroded. I think it’s more that teachers are becoming more suspicious overall because the tools that they’ve developed in the past no longer work. Students using AI is not a sign of, I don’t know, like moral degeneracy, and the youth of today are worse than they have been in the past, no. But you know, students are cheating nowadays, just like students would have cheated back when I was in high school or when my parents were in high score when my grandparents were in high school. It’s not a sign of moral decay. It’s a sign of, I don’t know, of the downfall of Western civilization or nothing like that. It’s just a new chapter in the book that’s been written forever. Cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s not just teachers trying to curb their students’ use of AI. Students are also upset with teachers for using ChatGPT to write lesson plans. In a New York Times report this year, students complained about their professors cheating them out of their tuition money, because in a way, it was ChatGpT teaching them. These issues have existed in education long before generative AI tools did. The existence and widespread use of AI just magnified them. Including this adversarial relationship between students and teachers. But in this scenario, teachers can set an example. If they don’t use AI, then maybe students won’t feel like they need to, either. Okay, now let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien, who is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Our audio engineer is Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsay is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, and I know it’s podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives, and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too. Or even your enemies! Or… frenemies? Your support is so important, especially in these unprecedented times. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate dot KQED.org/podcasts! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also! We want to hear from you! Email us CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram @CloseAllTabsPod. Or TikTok @CloseAllTabs. And join our Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at discord.gg/KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Teachers Strike Back Against AI Cheating | KQED",
"description": "Cheating in school isn’t new. But with AI making it easier than ever, teachers face a new challenge: where to draw the line, and how to make sure students are still learning. In this episode, we’ll take a look at three different approaches educators are adopting to deal with AI in their classrooms.First, Morgan sits down with Max Spero, founder of the AI detection company Pangram Labs, to discuss how detection tools should — and should not — be used in the classroom. Then, we hear from KQED reporter Marlena Jackson Retondo about the return of the iconic “blue books,” and the benefits of “analog” learning. Finally, Morgan calls up her cousin, Jeremy Na, who happens to be an English teacher in San Jose. He explains how he adapted his teaching style to focus on the process of learning, rather than a final grade — and why his method has kept AI out of his classroom (for the most part).",
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"socialDescription": "Cheating in school isn’t new. But with AI making it easier than ever, teachers face a new challenge: where to draw the line, and how to make sure students are still learning. In this episode, we’ll take a look at three different approaches educators are adopting to deal with AI in their classrooms.First, Morgan sits down with Max Spero, founder of the AI detection company Pangram Labs, to discuss how detection tools should — and should not — be used in the classroom. Then, we hear from KQED reporter Marlena Jackson Retondo about the return of the iconic “blue books,” and the benefits of “analog” learning. Finally, Morgan calls up her cousin, Jeremy Na, who happens to be an English teacher in San Jose. He explains how he adapted his teaching style to focus on the process of learning, rather than a final grade — and why his method has kept AI out of his classroom (for the most part).",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cheating in school isn’t new. But with AI making it easier than ever, teachers face a new challenge: where to draw the line and how to make sure students are still learning. In this episode, we’ll take a look at three different approaches educators are adopting to deal with AI in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First, Morgan sits down with Max Spero, CEO and co-founder of the AI detection company Pangram Labs, to discuss how detection tools should, and should not, be used in the classroom. Then, we hear from KQED reporter Marlena Jackson Retondo about the return of the iconic “blue books,” and the benefits of “analog” learning. Finally, Morgan calls up her cousin, Jeremy Na, who happens to be an English teacher in San Jose. He explains how he adapted his teaching style to focus on the process of learning, rather than a final grade — and why his method has kept AI out of his classroom (for the most part).\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC8041204001\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jeremy Na, Bay Area-based educator\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pangram.com/about-us\">Max Spero\u003c/a>, founder of Pangram Labs \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/mjacksonretondo\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Marlena Jackson-Retondo\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, engagement producer and reporter for KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> – James D. Walsh, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NYMag\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/64992/taking-exams-in-blue-books-its-back-to-help-curb-ai-use-and-rampant-cheating\">Taking Exams in Blue Books? They’re Back to Help Curb AI Use and Rampant Cheating\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> –\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Marlena Jackson Retondo\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, \u003ci>KQED’s Mindshift\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/business/chatgpt-ai-cheating-college-blue-books-5e3014a6\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">– Ben Cohen, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Wall Street Journal \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are your thoughts on, on generative AI? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Generative AI is a fancy autocomplete, in my opinion. Trusting it is no different than trusting a magic 8-ball. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jeremy Na is a Bay Area High School English teacher. He’s a great teacher, and I know this because he’s my older cousin, and he spent a lot of his teenage years at my parents’ dining table as my math tutor. Let’s just say I wasn’t the most cooperative student. One of the first hurdles of his teaching career was probably getting me to understand basic algebra. The second, getting me to actually sit down and do my math homework. And now, like many teachers, he faces another challenge: AI in the classroom. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When my students tell me a lot about how they trust AI answers and stuff like that, I reference the SpongeBob episode where, you know, everyone in Bikini Bottom is trusting a magic conch shell to give them answers and decide their life. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh magic conch shell, what do we need to do to get out of the kelp forest? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Nothing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>SpongeBob SquarePants: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The shell has spoken! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think it’s a big scam. Or rather, I know it’s big scam because, you know, it just sucks up money and is burning the environment for nothing. That’s my personal view of generative AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So yeah, my cousin Jeremy, not a fan of AI. In recent years, the use of AI tools has been a major point of contention between students and teachers. Scroll through any social media platform and you’ll see students give tips for getting away with submitting AI essays. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I use ChatGPT, but this is the way to use ChatGPT and not get flagged for any plagiarism or anything like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Teachers fretting about their students’ dependence on AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a nightmare that is destroying learning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then there are the students who don’t use AI but get dragged in anyway. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was falsely accused of using AI on my final paper last term, it was flagged as 60% AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In his nine years of teaching, my cousin Jeremy has seen his fair share of cheating attempts. His students have used ChatGBT since it launched about three years ago. But he quickly realized that his students were using it for more than just an academic shortcut. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They were asking me stuff like, Mr. Na, uh, how can I use AI to help me with this assignment? Or Mr. Na, you know, I was using AI the other day and it really helped me with X, Y, Z problem. At first, I thought these students were just kinda trolling cause like I thought to myself, there’s no way anyone would trust AI. This is the machines that like tell people to staple cheese to pizza to make it stick better. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Google AI actually recommended adding glue to pizza, but his point still stands. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But no, I realized soon enough that my students were like serious about trusting AI. And that’s when I realized, oh, my students, you know, they’ve fallen for the propaganda. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s still no consensus on the role of AI in education. Some teachers embrace it as a feature of their lesson plans. Others ban it from their classrooms entirely and blame AI for their students’ atrophied critical thinking skills. And at the center of this debate is a question that’s haunted educators throughout human history. What do we do about cheating? Now that everyone can carry little AI cheating machines in their pockets, AKA their phones, that debate has kicked into overdrive. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s episode is a little different, because instead of following one thread, this internet rabbit hole will take us down a few different paths. We’re going to look at three different approaches to curbing AI cheating in school. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back when the internet was brand new, students suddenly had access to a virtually endless trove of information to copy and paste from. Academics needed a way to tell what was original and what was copied. So plagiarism detection was born. An entire industry dedicated to identifying and flagging stolen work. But with generative AI blowing up, checking for plagiarism isn’t enough. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">First up, a new tab. What’s up with AI detection? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To get into this, I called up Max Spero, co-founder and self-described chief slop janitor of Pangram Labs. Pangram is an AI detection tool that flags texts generated by all the major models like ChatGBT and Claude and Grok, and also detects AI-generated edits from tools like Grammarly. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It could be an essay, it could be a review, it could a social media post. And then so we help people tell you like, yeah, what’s AI and what’s human. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cleaning up the slop. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cleaning up the slop as they say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Slop is the colloquial term for that low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. Pangram didn’t start out as an educational tool. Max said that the company’s first customers were actually websites trying to detect and delete fake reviews. Pangram offered a free trial version of the tool on its website. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then we were looking at the signups and we kept on seeing signups from like EDU addresses, people who are putting in what’s clearly student papers and people are doing this like at huge volumes. They’re just pasting in like dozens of papers a day. And then, so I think we were realizing like, hey, there’s a much bigger market here on this consumer side as well, where we can help teachers out because this is clearly a big need. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pangram’s detection works by showing its model two writing samples. The first, written by a human, and the second, similar but AI-generated. They do this over and over and again. The model learns to recognize the way humans write, and distinguish it from AI trying to replicate it. That’s how certain sentence structures or words like “delve” and “rich cultural tapestry”, or even, my beloved em-dash, became associated with AI writing. Humans use all of those features in writing, but AI models overuse them. They’re predictable. There’s a misconception that students can bypass detection tools by paraphrasing AI-generated writing. That may have been the case a few years ago, but detection tools are getting better. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We found that you need to rewrite at least 30% to 40% of some text before it’ll come back as human written. So you really have to like rewrite a large portion of the text before you’re able to erase these signs of AI writing. At that point, you might as well just write your essay yourself. But in the end, like all of these tools, at Pangram and other AI detectors, we can still train on these, the outputs of these tools, so we can detect, not only does this look AI generated, but it also looks like it was run through a humanizer. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a program that rewrites AI-generated text to sound more, well, human. And of course, humanizers use AI to do that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that’s even more clearly a sign of acting in bad faith. Like this is a clear indication that no, you didn’t just like misunderstand that you weren’t allowed to use ChatGPT, but like you actually were actively cheating here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s not impossible to bypass AI detection, but Max said that many AI detectors, including Pangram, can still flag humanized text as AI. He added that since these students are often trying to take the path of least resistance, the threat of detection could be enough to deter cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adding a little bit of friction here goes a long way to helping put down these guardrails and say like, okay, fine, you know, if it’s not really easy for me to just use AI to generate my assignment, I’ll just do it myself. It’s not that bad. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some teachers have tried to AI-proof their assignments by adding a random prompt in white text, like “mention bananas in every paragraph.” The human eye can’t see the white text on a white digital background. If a student copies and pastes it into ChatGPT, they’ll get a generated essay that has nothing to do with the actual assignment, but a lot to do with bananas. It’s a dead giveaway that they used AI to complete the paper. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s also some confusion over what detection scores mean. A score of 60% doesn’t mean that 60% of the essay is AI-generated, it’s a confidence score. It means that the detection tool is 60% certain that the text it analyzed is AI generated, which is pretty far from certain. That’s why students who wrote completely original papers have been accused of cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">These AI-proofing hacks and the knee-jerk reaction to accuse students of using AI without hearing them out says a lot about the relationship between students and teachers right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think there’s a big problem in trust right now in education, especially because, um, the nature of it is so adversarial. I think like we really need to take a step back and realize that we have a shared goal. The goal is to get the student to learn. And I think a lot of this starts with like how we understand assignments. Like, teachers need to be very clear to students like, hey, these are the guardrails. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like you can use AI, for example, to do brainstorming or an outline, but don’t use AI to fully produce your assignment. Um, and similarly, once the student has like a very clear understanding of like, these are the guidelines, this is what I can and can’t do, um, then it’s easier for them to work together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What’s your stance on teachers using Pangram to grade? Are AI detection tools like the end all be all? Can teachers rely on it completely? How do you best see Pangram being used in the grading process? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Max Spero:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s like really only the start. It is best used as a smoke detector to tell you, hey, something’s wrong. I should look into what’s going on here. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say like, hey, this AI detector flagged your work as AI, so I’m gonna give you a zero and then just like move on. I think that’s, that’s lazy and that doesn’t really turn the opportunity into a teaching moment. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Detection tools are just one part of a holistic grading process. Max added that some teachers integrate AI detection into their classroom platforms so that students can check themselves before they turn in their assignments. But other teachers are taking a wildly different approach. Instead of leaning into detection, they’re going back to the olden days. We’ll dive into the return of handwriting after this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Let’s take a look at the next strategy teachers have employed to hold the line against AI. If you were in college before the pandemic started, you might remember this vintage classic. Okay, new tab. Back to blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My colleague, Marlena Jackson-Retondo, is joining us for this part of our deep dive. Marlena has been reporting on AI and K through 12 education for MindShift, another KQED podcast about the future of learning. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I guess now we can say that blue books are an old-fashioned, in quotes, tool that, um, a lot of professors and high school teachers use to test students. And they’re used for a lot midterms and finals, and are an alternative to now what we know as, you know, digital testing tools. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve used blue books. You’ve used blue books. I feel like it wasn’t that long ago that we were using blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re not that old. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blue books are exactly what they sound like. They’re little booklets with a baby blue cover and lined paper. They’ve been around since the 1920s and they’ve been a staple of written exams in high school and college. I still remember the absolute horror I felt my junior year of college when my pen exploded just as I finished my constitutional law final and I had to turn in a blue book covered in purple ink. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But blue books were phased out when the pandemic shut down schools in 2020. Everything involved in learning, from lessons to homework to exams, took place online. And then, late last year, Marlena saw a viral post from Jason Coupe, a professor in Atlanta. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he was talking about using blue books, bringing them back to the classroom for his first midterm of that school year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you talk about his reasoning behind moving to blue books? How did other teachers react to that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He and a couple other professors in his department got together and discussed ways to mitigate cheating, use of AI, and also to reengage their students. When we spoke last year, there was a lot of discussion about really getting students to think on their feet, think critically, respond to questions in ways that they might in the real world. And he wasn’t seeing a lot of that in digital exams. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this wasn’t just about cheating. It wasn’t just about AI. There was also that sense of reconnecting the students to the coursework. And it was a learning curve for a lot of students, um, as I’ve heard from multiple professors, but it went well, and a lot of folks will continue to, to use these blue books. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By 2024, you know, this is a generation of students that have spent at least four years, you know, learning digitally in some capacity. How did they respond to having to go back to handwriting? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, so a lot of Coupe’s students didn’t know what a blue book was. They had never taken a handwritten exam. They didn’t what to do with the blue book, where to write their name. So he had to teach them. And I remember him saying that it reminded him of his time in teaching in elementary school, um, having to really break down certain processes for students. But, you know, they learned, they took the exam by hand, and he and other professors noticed a difference right away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aside from deterring cheating, how else does prioritizing handwritten notes impact learning? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The research on handwriting is actually really interesting. I spoke with Sophia Vinci-Booher out of Vanderbilt University. She talked to me about handwriting in a really interesting way in that it creates these neural connections to what you’re learning. And this is what she called the visual motor learning system. So it’s combining these two systems, the motor system of handwriting and the visuals of learning something that might be written on the board or a PowerPoint, and it’s combining them and it’s reinforcing what you’re learning when you’re writing by hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s been shown that the mode of taking notes, when it correlates with the mode of having to recall that information, like taking an exam. When those modes are synced, so let’s say there’s a student who takes notes by hand, and then they have to go and take an exam on a blue book, the recall is better that way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So essentially, students are “learning more”, that’s in big quotes, because obviously there are other factors involved in learning. But there’s better learning happening when the mode of note taking and recalling those notes is the same. So, you know, I think there’s a lot more research to look at and to be done, but there are certain benefits to writing by hand. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And blue books are hot again. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that blue book sales were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and almost 50% at the University of Florida. At UC Berkeley, blue book sales shot up 80% over the past two years. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Of course, this return to our roots has its limits. Blue books are great for exams, but they’re not a realistic option for longer assignments like research papers. And neither approach we’ve covered so far, AI detection and blue books, addresses the core reasons students cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s look at one final strategy in a new tab. The testmaxxing problem. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s go back to my cousin, Jeremy, who’s a high school English teacher in the Bay Area. We both grew up in New York City and went to very academically rigorous public high schools. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The standards of the time, this was in, you know, the early 2000s, was very much, let’s call it testmaxxing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In gaming, there’s this practice called minmaxxing — maximizing your stats with a minimal amount of effort. On the internet, adding maxing to the end of any word is kind of like a joke about optimizing. So by test maxing, Jeremy is referring to the way that students are encouraged to shape their whole approach to school around succeeding on tests instead of actually learning. He believes that’s the reason students cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, when I became a teacher, I set out to make sure that like no one else has that same experience as I did that, you know, students don’t have this miserable high school experience where they’re treated like cattle, basically. Like you gotta you gotta get those numbers up. Your entire worth is decided by these numbers. Our society has placed a lot of importance on the end result of education rather than like education itself. What I mean by that is it’s more important what grade you get on the test than what you learned through the process before taking the test. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To counter the pressure of testmaxxing, Jeremy does things differently in his classroom. He never assigns homework. All the work, including reading and writing assignments, is done in the classroom. He does assign long-term projects, like essays, but he has his own way of AI-proofing them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This methodology, this pedagogy that I’ve developed is developed from shifting priorities away from the end result over into focusing on the process, right? So the fact that it’s inconvenient to use AI was just kind of like a happy little bonus. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He really does make it inconvenient to cheat in his classes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now, I don’t see a lot of AI usage. It’s always like one or two out of my 150 students. And the reason I don’t see a lof of AI usage is because when we’re doing it, a long-term assignment like an essay, I make sure to break down that assignment into as many granular pieces as possible. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for example, with my freshmen, ninth graders, when we were doing an essay I’ll often walk them through, not only like how to construct each paragraph, but how to construct like the parts of each paragraph. Like sometimes we’ll go sentence by sentence. In that scenario it would be kind of absurd to use AI, right? Because like Mr. Na is telling you, okay, write one sentence about your opinion on this part of the book, right. Why, why would you go ask Grok or ChatGPT opinion about the book when you can just write your own opinion in one sentence. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is your classroom AI policy, even though, you know, you personally despise AI? Like do you use a detection tool for your students? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t use detection tools at all. I would not trust AI to tell me what the weather is. Why would I trust it to read student reports and, you know, analyze them? That’s absurd. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite his evident disdain for generative AI, my cousin doesn’t have the same zero tolerance policy that a lot of other teachers have. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t explicitly call out their paper for being AI. But what I will do is, you know, I’ll sit with them and be like, “You know, this, this paper’s got a lot of problems. This assignment that you wrote has lots of problems, like it’s, it’s overflowing with problems. I got to sit you down here and we got to talk for like 15 minutes. Sentence by sentence and deconstruct this essay to fix it.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like in that scenario, students do learn like what’s wrong with using AI. Conceivably, they could learn to cheat better this way, but in my view, what they’re actually learning is that the assignment I’m asking them to do is not something outside of their capabilities. So yes, they are learning what the flaws of AI are, but they’re also learning that they are more capable than they might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Telling a teenager not to do something never works. Yeah. If you want a teenager to do something, right? If you want that horse to drink that water, you gotta make the water appealing. You gotta explain why it’s in their best interests not to so, right? They gotta come to that conclusion on their own. The downside is that this process takes a lot of time. So yes, I don’t get through many bucks throughout the school year, but I feel like the quality of the work and the learning that students receive is a lot better for that sacrifice. And I’m willing, I’m, I am willing to make that sacrifice \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like on Reddit, I’m always seeing teachers and professors talk about the ways that they AI-proof their assignments, like adding white text to trip up the prompts or splitting up instructions into multiple documents so it’s really inconvenient to give it to ChatGPT. Have you and your colleagues tried any of these? What do you think about these, like, AI-proofing tricks? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think getting into a arms race with AI is unhelpful. So coming up with different ways to detect AI, and then AI comes up with ways of getting around that, you know, this arms race that you’re describing, I don’t see a point to engaging with it. If you want students to stop using AI, you got to address the core issue, right, rather than just constantly dealing with these symptoms like some absurd game of whack-a-mole. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As you might be able to tell, Jeremy feels pretty strongly about this. He believes that putting so much value on the final product, whether a final paper or a final test score, deprioritizes actual learning, overwhelms students, and incentivizes cheating. Still, he has to teach within the system that values end results. His students still have to take California’s standardized tests. But he said that prepping them for the annual state assessments doesn’t take that much time. For the rest of the school year, he can focus on breaking down assignments and, through that, developing their critical thinking skills. It’s not that grades don’t matter, but by focusing on actual learning, students feel less pressure to cheat. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone is telling them to participate in this rat race, that they have to. That they have no choice but to participate in this rat race to climb to the top, you know. If they are learning, right? I tell students not to deride all of their self-worth from the numbers they get at school. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It seems like the larger question we’re trying to answer throughout the episode is how do you maintain that sense of trust between students and teachers when generative AI tools makes cheating so easy? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jeremy Na:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think, say that like trust between student and teacher has eroded. I think it’s more that teachers are becoming more suspicious overall because the tools that they’ve developed in the past no longer work. Students using AI is not a sign of, I don’t know, like moral degeneracy, and the youth of today are worse than they have been in the past, no. But you know, students are cheating nowadays, just like students would have cheated back when I was in high school or when my parents were in high score when my grandparents were in high school. It’s not a sign of moral decay. It’s a sign of, I don’t know, of the downfall of Western civilization or nothing like that. It’s just a new chapter in the book that’s been written forever. Cheating. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s not just teachers trying to curb their students’ use of AI. Students are also upset with teachers for using ChatGPT to write lesson plans. In a New York Times report this year, students complained about their professors cheating them out of their tuition money, because in a way, it was ChatGpT teaching them. These issues have existed in education long before generative AI tools did. The existence and widespread use of AI just magnified them. Including this adversarial relationship between students and teachers. But in this scenario, teachers can set an example. If they don’t use AI, then maybe students won’t feel like they need to, either. Okay, now let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien, who is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Our audio engineer is Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsay is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok, and I know it’s podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives, and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too. Or even your enemies! Or… frenemies? Your support is so important, especially in these unprecedented times. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate dot KQED.org/podcasts! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also! We want to hear from you! Email us CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram @CloseAllTabsPod. Or TikTok @CloseAllTabs. And join our Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at discord.gg/KQED.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thousands of writers in Kenya make their living ghostwriting academic papers for wealthy Western students. It’s an industry known as “contract cheating” or “essay mills,” and is the subject of a new documentary, “The Shadow Scholars.” Directed by Eloise King, the film follows Kenyan-born Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori as she investigates this hidden industry and seeks to understand the essay writers working in the shadows of the educational system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan talks with Patricia and Eloise about the world of academic cheating, and how these writers are adapting to a world in which AI-generated essays are just a click away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC1401351139\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/our-people/patricia-kingori/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia Kingori\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, professor of global health ethics at the University of Oxford\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/challenge/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Felloweezee%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26__coig_challenged%3D1#\">Eloise King\u003c/a>, director of “The Shadow Scholars”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLZCTERhImw\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Shadow Scholars \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Directed by Eloise King \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354713537_Kenya's_Fake_Essay_Writers_and_the_Light_they_Shine_on_Assumptions_of_Shadows_in_Knowledge_Production/citation/download\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kenya’s “Fake Essay” Writers and the Light they Shine on Assumptions of Shadows in Knowledge Production\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Patricia Kingori, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Journal of African Cultural Studies \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/ghostwriting-essays-american-college-students-lucrative-profession-kenya-a9096461.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How writing essays for American students has become a lucrative profession overseas\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Farah Stockman, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Independent \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2025/05/14/georgia-bans-commercial-cheating-services/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Georgia Bans Commercial Cheating Services\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Derek Newton, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Forbes \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/90951343/ai-essays-advertising-on-meta-and-tiktok\">Companies that use AI to help you cheat at school are thriving on TikTok and Meta\u003c/a> — Chris Stokel-Walker, \u003ci>Fast Company\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagine you’re a college student. The end of the semester is just around the corner. It’s the middle of finals week and you have to study for an exam, finish a presentation and turn in a research paper all within the next 12 hours. Unfortunately, you’ve been procrastinating and you only have time to finish two of those three things. You could use a tool like Chat GPT, but you don’t wanna get caught using AI. So you open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the search bar, you type, essay… writer… fast. Enter. Dozens of results pop up. Websites with generic-sounding names, but sleek, friendly designs. They promise high-quality, custom essays delivered in days, or even hours. All you have to do is run through a few drop-down menus and pick what you need, and then enter your credit card number. You’ve just stepped into an industry known as “contract cheating,” better known as essay mills. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the subject of a new documentary, The Shadow Scholars, which just had its North American premiere at Tribeca Film Festival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Shadow Scholars Trailer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve all grown up being told that education empowers us. And if you study at school, then you’re going to get the rewards. I’m going to shine a light on the world’s billion-dollar secret. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It looks at who the people are on the other side of that screen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One day I was invited to go along to a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute and they were talking about these online laborers. And then they started talking about different parts of the world and where different people in different parts of the worlds use the internet for work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Patricia Kingori, a Kenyan-born UK-based sociologist. In 2021, she became the youngest Black professor at the University of Oxford. She’s also one of the main subjects of the film. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So then they described Kenya and said, you know, there is this writing and translation work, which is a kind of euphemism for the fake essay industry. And I just became really interested in, well, who are these people? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This topic is personal for Patricia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think if you have had your thesis stolen, as I have had the ideas from my thesis stolen, you immediately start to believe that an industry where people do benefit from the intellect of others exists, right? I think really allowed me to start from a presumption of the fact that they exist rather than I think where many people have not had this experience might start, which is, well, how can that be? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just after attending the lecture, Patricia caught up with filmmaker Eloise King, who ended up directing the documentary. They had known each other for years, and Patricia casually mentioned the so-called fake essay industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My immediate reaction was how do real people write fake essays? And I was immediately obsessed. I think one of the things that we share is a kind of an inquisitiveness that goes really deep once it’s sort of implanted. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so, Eloise and Patricia, dug deeper. What they found was a booming, but mostly hidden industry of writers centered in Kenya, who are paid to produce academic work for others. Patricia wrote about it in 2021 in the Journal of African Culture Studies. The name “shadow scholars” comes from author Dave Tomar, who wrote about his own experience as an academic ghostwriter in his 2012 memoir. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The film, “The Shadow Scholars”, is less about the ethics of cheating and more about the unseen labor involved. The documentary focuses on the shadow scholars based in Kenya, which is a major hub for the fake essay industry. They’re often hired by students in the US, the UK, and Australia. Here’s Patricia in the film. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So of all of the online labor work that’s going on in Kenya, 72% of that… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Professor Vili Lehdonvirta: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is engaged in writing and translation work. Actually, we know it’s just writing essays for students in global North universities. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so, Patricia presenting these findings really turned on a light for me because what we had was this really difficult to prove, you know, lived experience of like global majority but like marginalized communities within education. And so I just became really excited with the idea that we could ask more questions and find out if this flow of information was really kind of fueling institutions around the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s not just undergrad essays. Shadow scholars are also hired to write entire PhD dissertations. They do all of the work, but someone else gets the credit, the qualifications, and eventually the jobs. The shadow scholars, meanwhile, aren’t afforded the same opportunities. So who are these shadow scholars? How does this exchange work? And what is the generative AI boom doing to this industry that relies on human intellectual labor? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We sat down with Patricia and Eloise to learn about how this industry works and shine some light on the people at the center of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Time for a new tab. Who are the shadow scholars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even the word fake essay, like that’s such a loaded phrase where, you know, the premise may be fake, but the person writing it is real, the content is real, it is a real academic work. Why frame this as shadow scholars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Think it really forces us to think about something that we often don’t think about. So in relation to Africa, the word shadow is the most common analogy that’s used to describe Africa, “in the shadow of”, “the shadows of this.” It’s always in the shadows. And I think that I became really interested in this concept of the shadow, because in Swahili there is no word for shadow is something that doesn’t exist. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So from the moment you say that something is a shadow, basically what you’re saying is that it doesn’t exist in the world. And as the writers in Kenya themselves do, you could say it’s a support agency. You could use any number of different words for it, but to use it and to say that they’re shadow scholars, I think is something that’s forcing us to say, are these people real? Are they visible from whose perspective? And use the words to really question their position in the world and how they want to be seen in the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Eloise again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You just look at what media are saying about these people and how they’re discussing it and how it’s being discussed in the mainstream, right? And, you know, they’re being called these cancers that are brick by brick, breaking down um the sort of legitimacy of education. Like, the language is so xenophobic. Their identity was being hijacked and used in these really derogatory terms. And so that was something as well that really mindful throughout, like, how do we engage with them directly and have this story told from their perspective, but also like very much more on their terms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A review of studies found that nearly 16% of students admitted to contract cheating between 2014 and 2018. Extrapolated globally, that’s over 30 million students. The stats that we do have about contract cheating are likely skewed because they rely on students to self-report on their own cheating habits. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Altogether, Eloise said it’s a $15 billion industry. There are about 40,000 writers just in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. That number fluctuates based on demand. Patricia said that during the end of the semester, when students are scrambling to turn in work, the number of writers might double. And is this an industry concentrated in Kenya, is it unique to Kenya, or does it manifest elsewhere in the Global South? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah it definitely does. When we talk to other academics who are looking into this, Dr Thomas Lancaster, who appears in the film, he specifically said there isn’t a country or university in the world where we don’t think that this is going on. It just so happens that Kenya is the hot spot, the global hot spot, where the greatest number of people are doing this work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kenya is a hotspot, because it’s an English speaking country with a strong education system and a high adult literacy rate. But at the same time, there aren’t many career opportunities for young people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s really worth saying that this industry has always existed. It’s actually nothing new insofar as there has always been people who have benefited from having other people write their work and do their work for them. What’s new now is the scale of the industry and the geography of the industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But for example, we know that increasingly we’re getting so many of these kind of hidden figures stories. We’re hearing about, you know, women, we’re hearing about African-American, we’re hearing about gay and queer people who have propped up other people who’ve gone on to claim qualifications or claim inventions on their behalf because they were marginalized in history. What’s happened is as this has become harder and harder to actually do without scrutiny in the Global North, it’s shifted to locations that have been made invisible and that we were all invested in making this place as invisible, and also, because of technology, we can have this happen on a scale it’s never happened before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok. Let’s recap how this process works from students’ perspectives. A lot of these essay writing services advertise all over Instagram and TikTok. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Influencer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I actually paid someone, I paid three people to write my essays. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Or they have excellent SEO. So if you Google “write a paper fast”, they’ll be at the very top of your results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Influencer 2: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the fastest ways to meet your essay deadline while using a paper writing service is to choose one that offers a quick turnaround time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once you settle on a site, you pick your subject and the grade you want and a page count. These sites might charge something like $8 per page, but charge more for more specialized topics like engineering or medicine. An undergrad literature essay, for example, will be significantly cheaper than a doctorate-level thesis. When you put your order in, you set a deadline, which could be anything from six months to six hours. For the shadow scholars in Kenya, the writers behind these papers, it’s all about response time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The thing that really fascinated me about the writers were there was a level of psychology that was involved actually. Um, you know, they would often set their alarms and their clocks to be up at certain times because they knew that’s when students would start to panic, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So they know that, you know, in the UK, if I have a deadline for tomorrow, I might maybe have a look at it, but by about 10 o’clock, I’m starting to get tired. I know I’m not going to get this thing done. That’s when I’m starting to look online for help. So they know, okay, around, you know, one o’clock, two o’ clock in the morning Kenya time, I need to be up because that’s when somebody’s gonna be jumping in online to get help. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some of the students who hire these services are very privileged. They’re even wealthy enough to hire shadow scholars for every university assignment up until graduation. And they develop relationships with the writers too. One of the Kenyan writers profiled in the documentary, Chege, had worked for the same student for years and through that was able to buy a car and pay for his sister to attend university. These dynamics are complex. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s really easy to imagine a world where the writers are quite derogatory about the students or they think badly of them or they speak about them in negative terms. I think one of the things that was really surprising for me was how much empathy sometimes they had with the students right and how they really genuinely saw themselves as trying to help these students. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think their empathy was really important in terms of how we then managed the story because it’s really easy to paint a picture of good guys and bad guys and those guys are terrible and these guys are great, but actually we needed a much more nuanced story about the students themselves as people who we wouldn’t necessarily use the word victims, but certainly weren’t necessarily always winning in this system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students hiring these writers have to have a certain level of access to resources to be able to do it at all. But the majority of them are not that rich. They’ll do most of their semester’s work by themselves and will hire shadow scholars as a last resort. Here’s Eloise again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there’s a student who appears in the film called Kate, who talks about just how incredibly competitive it is at university. And once you understand that everyone’s cheating, it becomes almost like a zero sum game where if you aren’t cheating, then are you gonna be left behind if you aren’t getting someone else to do the work for you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The film shows Kate, overwhelmed, turning to an essay writing agency. But she doesn’t have the $300 to pay for her final paper. So she turns to the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone is so entwined by technology. Like we had Kate, who cannot afford to pay for the essay and then sells nudes online. But the fact is that in this kind of mechanism of like progress, like she’s both someone who was like a consumer and a trader in it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you describe any of the essay writers you profiled? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The shadows that we profiled were um young students who had then got on to graduate. So the point at which we met them and we spent four years filming with them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the writers in the film are in their early to late 20s. There’s Mercy, a single mother who has a day job, but stays up late writing essays as a side gig. There’s Atticus, who specializes in technical writing for math and engineering classes. And then there’s Chege, the writer who was able to send his sister to university while being forced to put his own educational dreams on hold. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> One of the things I suppose I was really interested in focusing on was that after university life, like what is that kind of moment where everything should be great, you get the job of your dreams and actually what we found were a number of people who then ended up finding themselves in this industry for a long time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eloise said that writers only get about 30% of the fee. The agency takes the rest. Not only are they underpaid, but they also can’t claim any credit for the work that they’re doing. They can’t use any of this experience to apply to universities themselves, especially not graduate programs, because they’re helping students cheat. This industry keeps ghost writers in the shadows. Let’s talk about the cost of anonymity in a new tab. After this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. The cost of anonymity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of this work is uncredited. Can you talk about how that anonymity puts the writers at a disadvantage? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What you just see is that the writers are doing all of this work, they’re gaining the knowledge, they were really proud to be acquiring so much knowledge, they really saw that as a value to them, you know. But it doesn’t mean that they’re able to add it to their CV, it doesn’t mean that they are able to get into overseas universities to do a master’s degree, even though they might have been supplying the work for years to students who are going to those institutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like presently there’s not a single university in Australia, for example, who would accept an undergraduate degree from Kenya to enter into a master’s program. And yet, they are probably third on the list as recipients of academic writing work from authors in Kenya who have been paid to do it on behalf of the students who are there. They are the ghosts in the cyber wars of these institutions, but they’re never being allowed in through the front door. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia, I’m hoping you could answer this next question, but is there any stigma against being a fake essay writer? I mean, how do academic institutions see the role of the shadow scholar? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There isn’t a world that they can be in at the moment as themselves that would give them credit for all of the things that they’ve done. And so the film is really a kind of way to try to ensure that some level of that happens for them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s another complication here, too. These academic cheating services are illegal in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and some American states. In the UK, offering these services is actually a criminal offense. Because of that, the documentary uses deepfake technology on some of its interview subjects to conceal their identities and avoid criminalizing them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But while the film has taken steps to anonymize these writers, essay mill sites themselves aren’t exactly secure. The writers’ legal names and photo IDs, the students’ final papers. All of this can be accessed fairly easily by bad actors. This digital paper trail could come back to haunt both students and writers, especially as more governments move to ban these services. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think for the writers, we’re not sure how it’s going to affect their future careers, but actually they’ve got very short to medium term needs that there’s no other way for them to meet them, you know. So they have to do this writing really and many of them actually try at the same time to do other work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For example, as we’ve mentioned with Australia, if they continue to see them as criminals and one of these writers, for example, wants to take up qualifications or have an opportunity in Australia, I don’t know what that will mean in terms of their identity being leaked or something like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I just think on like an emotional level and a kind of lived experience level, like having this digital footprint where you made a decision when you were hard up and you were like in your 20s maybe or in your late teens, being there and being like on record and traceable when you have absolutely no idea, it’s just not something that anyone would want and anyone would sign up for. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The idea that like you’re susceptible to any kind of blackmail, like should you find yourself in like public office. And I think that’s on both sides. I think like a very real possibility. And so I think anyone who’s like holding large swathes of data, you know, they might not be nefarious themselves but they might be selling it on. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia and Eloise have been following these shadow scholars for over four years. In that time, generative AI tools have rapidly become more sophisticated and accessible. Academic cheating is now as easy as a single click and it costs next to nothing. So is anyone still using essay writing services? What happens to the shadow scholars, whose livelihoods depend on essay writing, if students don’t have to pay a human to cheat? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one last tab. Shadow Scholars and AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the years that the artificial intelligence industry was exploding, Eloise had been keeping tabs on a Facebook group for shadow scholars from all over the world. When she first started working on the film in 2020, it had about 60,000 members. By the time production was over, three years later, that number had roughly tripled. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you could see how this industry was growing. But that acted as this kind of like town crier, like forum for understanding what people were feeling. And what people felt was in the first instance, like, “Oh God, we are totally over. Like this is the end of the industry. We were already being made invisible and now people are gonna go to this service that’s cheaper and we’re gonna be totally wiped out.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And by the end, as always, again, what is totally part of this kind of liberatory ideology that seems to sit within it is that people saying, “Well, actually, no, it’s not. It’s not perfect. We have this knowledge, we’ve been doing this for a long time.” And whilst their incomes were definitely and have definitely been impacted by the advent of AI, there was really this pushback that was happening that said, “Actually when you have the knowledge at the source, and you’re able to check it, the quality will be superior.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I wonder if Patricia, you can talk much more about like testing and the way that algorithms are like totally detectable by universities. And I think we’ve all become really accustomed to like the long dash. Like when I see that in a reply from someone…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which is tragic for me as a writer. I love the em dash. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There isn’t a uniform position by universities, right? So some universities are like, okay, if you’ve got particular needs, you can use AI. Other people are like under no circumstances do you use AI, and so the writers have been really able to exploit that lack of uniform position as part of a sales tactic to say, “Look, if use AI send your work to us, we will humanize it. We will remove all traces that you’ve had AI and we’ll send it back to you at a cost. It’ll cost you more because actually it requires more expertise to be able to spot all the falsifications, to spot the ways that AI hallucinates, to check all the references. We will do that detailed work and we will send it to you if you want to use AI. Or we can continue to do something bespoke for you.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think it has definitely shaped the way that they work because they’re getting many more students who are sending them things that they’ve used AI and said, “Can you make this look like I haven’t used AI,” and are charging them for that. Yet again, we’re in this world where we would rather think that AI has absolutely no human involvement than actually acknowledge the fact that it requires enormous amounts of human capital to make it happen in the first place. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that was the most interesting takeaway for me being a tech reporter watching the film was seeing the way that this industry of people adapted. Like Patricia said, this work is even more specialized than just writing the essay to make it sound human and to spot these kind of inconsistencies that only exist with AI. But at the same time, it seems to push them further into the shadows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it really does. I think you’ve kind of hit on something that we found in this film. There was this perpetual loop that would happen where just at the moment you think there is a shift or reckoning that allows them to be seen and to be acknowledged, like there is another systemic move that further pushes them into the background. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think AI is kind of coalesces into two things, doesn’t it? It’s like, one, people would rather think that like robots and computers are going to like take over the world and they’re like so smart. But what it does is it comes up against an innate prejudice where people for years have thought that the “Africans” need to, and I use that like term because you know that’s how people use it in this sweeping term, like that they need to be educated, they need be taught how to be civilized, and actually what too many imaginations cannot hold is the reality that there are millions of educated people in the fastest growing youth population on the planet who are having access to technology that allows them to share their education. That was an inheritance of colonial settlements and imposed education systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so all of these things are totally intertwined. The prejudice that people think that they couldn’t be that smart to begin with and the prejudice that then denies when proof is beyond needing any more evidence that it still finds a way to deny them of this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many shadow scholars have pivoted to editing and humanizing AI-generated writing. But AI itself keeps advancing. There are now countless AI tools that claim to be able to humanize other AI-generated text in order to bypass AI detection tools. Right now, those tools still don’t compare to actual human-written work. But at some point in the future, will shadow scholars become redundant? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think they will continue to adapt in ways that we haven’t even thought about yet, because we haven t been able to predict how they’ve lasted this long in the face of all of these different challenges. So, as long as there is demand, there will be these writers and I think there will continue be demand because institutions need to find ways to judge who is good or who isn’t good. And so I think that’s an important thing for us to think about. Is it possible that we can have a world where these qualifications start to mean something different, right, and who is good or not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Shadow scholars have been fighting for recognition long before AI was a problem. Even though the documentary conceals individual writers’ identities, Eloise hopes that it at least makes more people aware of the industry. It’s not mysterious criminals powering essay mills, but real writers who are forced into the shadows because they don’t have the same opportunities as students in the global North.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This documentary is also a kind of reckoning for academia. What does it mean for these institutions, if they’re awarding degrees and certifications to people who didn’t actually do the work to get them? And the people who did do the work are prevented from entering those very institutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Next week, we’ll look at how this is playing out with younger students as we dive into how teachers are handling AI in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The documentary, “The Shadow Scholars,” hits UK theaters on September 18th. For updates on this and further screenings, follow @ShadowScholarsFilm on Instagram. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For now, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva, and edited by Chris Egusa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Chris Hambrick and Jen Chien, who is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Our audio engineer is Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsay is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ok, and I know it’s podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives, and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too. Or even your enemies! Or… frenemies? Your support is so important, especially in these \u003cem>unprecedented times\u003c/em>. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to Donate.KQED.org/podcasts!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also! We want to hear from you! Email us CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram at “close all tabs pod.” Or TikTok at “close all tabs.” And join our Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at Discord.gg/KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thousands of writers in Kenya make their living ghostwriting academic papers for wealthy Western students. It’s an industry known as “contract cheating” or “essay mills,” and is the subject of a new documentary, “The Shadow Scholars.” Directed by Eloise King, the film follows Kenyan-born Oxford Professor Patricia Kingori as she investigates this hidden industry and seeks to understand the essay writers working in the shadows of the educational system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan talks with Patricia and Eloise about the world of academic cheating, and how these writers are adapting to a world in which AI-generated essays are just a click away. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC1401351139\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/our-people/patricia-kingori/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia Kingori\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, professor of global health ethics at the University of Oxford\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/challenge/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Felloweezee%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26__coig_challenged%3D1#\">Eloise King\u003c/a>, director of “The Shadow Scholars”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLZCTERhImw\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Shadow Scholars \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Directed by Eloise King \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354713537_Kenya's_Fake_Essay_Writers_and_the_Light_they_Shine_on_Assumptions_of_Shadows_in_Knowledge_Production/citation/download\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kenya’s “Fake Essay” Writers and the Light they Shine on Assumptions of Shadows in Knowledge Production\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Patricia Kingori, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Journal of African Cultural Studies \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/ghostwriting-essays-american-college-students-lucrative-profession-kenya-a9096461.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How writing essays for American students has become a lucrative profession overseas\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Farah Stockman, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Independent \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2025/05/14/georgia-bans-commercial-cheating-services/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Georgia Bans Commercial Cheating Services\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Derek Newton, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Forbes \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/90951343/ai-essays-advertising-on-meta-and-tiktok\">Companies that use AI to help you cheat at school are thriving on TikTok and Meta\u003c/a> — Chris Stokel-Walker, \u003ci>Fast Company\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Imagine you’re a college student. The end of the semester is just around the corner. It’s the middle of finals week and you have to study for an exam, finish a presentation and turn in a research paper all within the next 12 hours. Unfortunately, you’ve been procrastinating and you only have time to finish two of those three things. You could use a tool like Chat GPT, but you don’t wanna get caught using AI. So you open a new tab. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the search bar, you type, essay… writer… fast. Enter. Dozens of results pop up. Websites with generic-sounding names, but sleek, friendly designs. They promise high-quality, custom essays delivered in days, or even hours. All you have to do is run through a few drop-down menus and pick what you need, and then enter your credit card number. You’ve just stepped into an industry known as “contract cheating,” better known as essay mills. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the subject of a new documentary, The Shadow Scholars, which just had its North American premiere at Tribeca Film Festival. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Shadow Scholars Trailer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’ve all grown up being told that education empowers us. And if you study at school, then you’re going to get the rewards. I’m going to shine a light on the world’s billion-dollar secret. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It looks at who the people are on the other side of that screen. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One day I was invited to go along to a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute and they were talking about these online laborers. And then they started talking about different parts of the world and where different people in different parts of the worlds use the internet for work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Patricia Kingori, a Kenyan-born UK-based sociologist. In 2021, she became the youngest Black professor at the University of Oxford. She’s also one of the main subjects of the film. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So then they described Kenya and said, you know, there is this writing and translation work, which is a kind of euphemism for the fake essay industry. And I just became really interested in, well, who are these people? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This topic is personal for Patricia. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think if you have had your thesis stolen, as I have had the ideas from my thesis stolen, you immediately start to believe that an industry where people do benefit from the intellect of others exists, right? I think really allowed me to start from a presumption of the fact that they exist rather than I think where many people have not had this experience might start, which is, well, how can that be? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just after attending the lecture, Patricia caught up with filmmaker Eloise King, who ended up directing the documentary. They had known each other for years, and Patricia casually mentioned the so-called fake essay industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My immediate reaction was how do real people write fake essays? And I was immediately obsessed. I think one of the things that we share is a kind of an inquisitiveness that goes really deep once it’s sort of implanted. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so, Eloise and Patricia, dug deeper. What they found was a booming, but mostly hidden industry of writers centered in Kenya, who are paid to produce academic work for others. Patricia wrote about it in 2021 in the Journal of African Culture Studies. The name “shadow scholars” comes from author Dave Tomar, who wrote about his own experience as an academic ghostwriter in his 2012 memoir. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The film, “The Shadow Scholars”, is less about the ethics of cheating and more about the unseen labor involved. The documentary focuses on the shadow scholars based in Kenya, which is a major hub for the fake essay industry. They’re often hired by students in the US, the UK, and Australia. Here’s Patricia in the film. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So of all of the online labor work that’s going on in Kenya, 72% of that… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Professor Vili Lehdonvirta: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Is engaged in writing and translation work. Actually, we know it’s just writing essays for students in global North universities. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so, Patricia presenting these findings really turned on a light for me because what we had was this really difficult to prove, you know, lived experience of like global majority but like marginalized communities within education. And so I just became really excited with the idea that we could ask more questions and find out if this flow of information was really kind of fueling institutions around the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And it’s not just undergrad essays. Shadow scholars are also hired to write entire PhD dissertations. They do all of the work, but someone else gets the credit, the qualifications, and eventually the jobs. The shadow scholars, meanwhile, aren’t afforded the same opportunities. So who are these shadow scholars? How does this exchange work? And what is the generative AI boom doing to this industry that relies on human intellectual labor? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We sat down with Patricia and Eloise to learn about how this industry works and shine some light on the people at the center of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Time for a new tab. Who are the shadow scholars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even the word fake essay, like that’s such a loaded phrase where, you know, the premise may be fake, but the person writing it is real, the content is real, it is a real academic work. Why frame this as shadow scholars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Think it really forces us to think about something that we often don’t think about. So in relation to Africa, the word shadow is the most common analogy that’s used to describe Africa, “in the shadow of”, “the shadows of this.” It’s always in the shadows. And I think that I became really interested in this concept of the shadow, because in Swahili there is no word for shadow is something that doesn’t exist. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So from the moment you say that something is a shadow, basically what you’re saying is that it doesn’t exist in the world. And as the writers in Kenya themselves do, you could say it’s a support agency. You could use any number of different words for it, but to use it and to say that they’re shadow scholars, I think is something that’s forcing us to say, are these people real? Are they visible from whose perspective? And use the words to really question their position in the world and how they want to be seen in the world. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Eloise again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You just look at what media are saying about these people and how they’re discussing it and how it’s being discussed in the mainstream, right? And, you know, they’re being called these cancers that are brick by brick, breaking down um the sort of legitimacy of education. Like, the language is so xenophobic. Their identity was being hijacked and used in these really derogatory terms. And so that was something as well that really mindful throughout, like, how do we engage with them directly and have this story told from their perspective, but also like very much more on their terms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A review of studies found that nearly 16% of students admitted to contract cheating between 2014 and 2018. Extrapolated globally, that’s over 30 million students. The stats that we do have about contract cheating are likely skewed because they rely on students to self-report on their own cheating habits. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Altogether, Eloise said it’s a $15 billion industry. There are about 40,000 writers just in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. That number fluctuates based on demand. Patricia said that during the end of the semester, when students are scrambling to turn in work, the number of writers might double. And is this an industry concentrated in Kenya, is it unique to Kenya, or does it manifest elsewhere in the Global South? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah it definitely does. When we talk to other academics who are looking into this, Dr Thomas Lancaster, who appears in the film, he specifically said there isn’t a country or university in the world where we don’t think that this is going on. It just so happens that Kenya is the hot spot, the global hot spot, where the greatest number of people are doing this work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kenya is a hotspot, because it’s an English speaking country with a strong education system and a high adult literacy rate. But at the same time, there aren’t many career opportunities for young people. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s really worth saying that this industry has always existed. It’s actually nothing new insofar as there has always been people who have benefited from having other people write their work and do their work for them. What’s new now is the scale of the industry and the geography of the industry. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But for example, we know that increasingly we’re getting so many of these kind of hidden figures stories. We’re hearing about, you know, women, we’re hearing about African-American, we’re hearing about gay and queer people who have propped up other people who’ve gone on to claim qualifications or claim inventions on their behalf because they were marginalized in history. What’s happened is as this has become harder and harder to actually do without scrutiny in the Global North, it’s shifted to locations that have been made invisible and that we were all invested in making this place as invisible, and also, because of technology, we can have this happen on a scale it’s never happened before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ok. Let’s recap how this process works from students’ perspectives. A lot of these essay writing services advertise all over Instagram and TikTok. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Influencer: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I actually paid someone, I paid three people to write my essays. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Or they have excellent SEO. So if you Google “write a paper fast”, they’ll be at the very top of your results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Influencer 2: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the fastest ways to meet your essay deadline while using a paper writing service is to choose one that offers a quick turnaround time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once you settle on a site, you pick your subject and the grade you want and a page count. These sites might charge something like $8 per page, but charge more for more specialized topics like engineering or medicine. An undergrad literature essay, for example, will be significantly cheaper than a doctorate-level thesis. When you put your order in, you set a deadline, which could be anything from six months to six hours. For the shadow scholars in Kenya, the writers behind these papers, it’s all about response time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The thing that really fascinated me about the writers were there was a level of psychology that was involved actually. Um, you know, they would often set their alarms and their clocks to be up at certain times because they knew that’s when students would start to panic, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So they know that, you know, in the UK, if I have a deadline for tomorrow, I might maybe have a look at it, but by about 10 o’clock, I’m starting to get tired. I know I’m not going to get this thing done. That’s when I’m starting to look online for help. So they know, okay, around, you know, one o’clock, two o’ clock in the morning Kenya time, I need to be up because that’s when somebody’s gonna be jumping in online to get help. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some of the students who hire these services are very privileged. They’re even wealthy enough to hire shadow scholars for every university assignment up until graduation. And they develop relationships with the writers too. One of the Kenyan writers profiled in the documentary, Chege, had worked for the same student for years and through that was able to buy a car and pay for his sister to attend university. These dynamics are complex. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s really easy to imagine a world where the writers are quite derogatory about the students or they think badly of them or they speak about them in negative terms. I think one of the things that was really surprising for me was how much empathy sometimes they had with the students right and how they really genuinely saw themselves as trying to help these students. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think their empathy was really important in terms of how we then managed the story because it’s really easy to paint a picture of good guys and bad guys and those guys are terrible and these guys are great, but actually we needed a much more nuanced story about the students themselves as people who we wouldn’t necessarily use the word victims, but certainly weren’t necessarily always winning in this system. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The students hiring these writers have to have a certain level of access to resources to be able to do it at all. But the majority of them are not that rich. They’ll do most of their semester’s work by themselves and will hire shadow scholars as a last resort. Here’s Eloise again. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there’s a student who appears in the film called Kate, who talks about just how incredibly competitive it is at university. And once you understand that everyone’s cheating, it becomes almost like a zero sum game where if you aren’t cheating, then are you gonna be left behind if you aren’t getting someone else to do the work for you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The film shows Kate, overwhelmed, turning to an essay writing agency. But she doesn’t have the $300 to pay for her final paper. So she turns to the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone is so entwined by technology. Like we had Kate, who cannot afford to pay for the essay and then sells nudes online. But the fact is that in this kind of mechanism of like progress, like she’s both someone who was like a consumer and a trader in it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you describe any of the essay writers you profiled? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The shadows that we profiled were um young students who had then got on to graduate. So the point at which we met them and we spent four years filming with them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the writers in the film are in their early to late 20s. There’s Mercy, a single mother who has a day job, but stays up late writing essays as a side gig. There’s Atticus, who specializes in technical writing for math and engineering classes. And then there’s Chege, the writer who was able to send his sister to university while being forced to put his own educational dreams on hold. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> One of the things I suppose I was really interested in focusing on was that after university life, like what is that kind of moment where everything should be great, you get the job of your dreams and actually what we found were a number of people who then ended up finding themselves in this industry for a long time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eloise said that writers only get about 30% of the fee. The agency takes the rest. Not only are they underpaid, but they also can’t claim any credit for the work that they’re doing. They can’t use any of this experience to apply to universities themselves, especially not graduate programs, because they’re helping students cheat. This industry keeps ghost writers in the shadows. Let’s talk about the cost of anonymity in a new tab. After this break. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open a new tab. The cost of anonymity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of this work is uncredited. Can you talk about how that anonymity puts the writers at a disadvantage? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What you just see is that the writers are doing all of this work, they’re gaining the knowledge, they were really proud to be acquiring so much knowledge, they really saw that as a value to them, you know. But it doesn’t mean that they’re able to add it to their CV, it doesn’t mean that they are able to get into overseas universities to do a master’s degree, even though they might have been supplying the work for years to students who are going to those institutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like presently there’s not a single university in Australia, for example, who would accept an undergraduate degree from Kenya to enter into a master’s program. And yet, they are probably third on the list as recipients of academic writing work from authors in Kenya who have been paid to do it on behalf of the students who are there. They are the ghosts in the cyber wars of these institutions, but they’re never being allowed in through the front door. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia, I’m hoping you could answer this next question, but is there any stigma against being a fake essay writer? I mean, how do academic institutions see the role of the shadow scholar? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There isn’t a world that they can be in at the moment as themselves that would give them credit for all of the things that they’ve done. And so the film is really a kind of way to try to ensure that some level of that happens for them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s another complication here, too. These academic cheating services are illegal in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and some American states. In the UK, offering these services is actually a criminal offense. Because of that, the documentary uses deepfake technology on some of its interview subjects to conceal their identities and avoid criminalizing them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But while the film has taken steps to anonymize these writers, essay mill sites themselves aren’t exactly secure. The writers’ legal names and photo IDs, the students’ final papers. All of this can be accessed fairly easily by bad actors. This digital paper trail could come back to haunt both students and writers, especially as more governments move to ban these services. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think for the writers, we’re not sure how it’s going to affect their future careers, but actually they’ve got very short to medium term needs that there’s no other way for them to meet them, you know. So they have to do this writing really and many of them actually try at the same time to do other work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For example, as we’ve mentioned with Australia, if they continue to see them as criminals and one of these writers, for example, wants to take up qualifications or have an opportunity in Australia, I don’t know what that will mean in terms of their identity being leaked or something like that. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I just think on like an emotional level and a kind of lived experience level, like having this digital footprint where you made a decision when you were hard up and you were like in your 20s maybe or in your late teens, being there and being like on record and traceable when you have absolutely no idea, it’s just not something that anyone would want and anyone would sign up for. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The idea that like you’re susceptible to any kind of blackmail, like should you find yourself in like public office. And I think that’s on both sides. I think like a very real possibility. And so I think anyone who’s like holding large swathes of data, you know, they might not be nefarious themselves but they might be selling it on. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patricia and Eloise have been following these shadow scholars for over four years. In that time, generative AI tools have rapidly become more sophisticated and accessible. Academic cheating is now as easy as a single click and it costs next to nothing. So is anyone still using essay writing services? What happens to the shadow scholars, whose livelihoods depend on essay writing, if students don’t have to pay a human to cheat? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one last tab. Shadow Scholars and AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Over the years that the artificial intelligence industry was exploding, Eloise had been keeping tabs on a Facebook group for shadow scholars from all over the world. When she first started working on the film in 2020, it had about 60,000 members. By the time production was over, three years later, that number had roughly tripled. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you could see how this industry was growing. But that acted as this kind of like town crier, like forum for understanding what people were feeling. And what people felt was in the first instance, like, “Oh God, we are totally over. Like this is the end of the industry. We were already being made invisible and now people are gonna go to this service that’s cheaper and we’re gonna be totally wiped out.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And by the end, as always, again, what is totally part of this kind of liberatory ideology that seems to sit within it is that people saying, “Well, actually, no, it’s not. It’s not perfect. We have this knowledge, we’ve been doing this for a long time.” And whilst their incomes were definitely and have definitely been impacted by the advent of AI, there was really this pushback that was happening that said, “Actually when you have the knowledge at the source, and you’re able to check it, the quality will be superior.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I wonder if Patricia, you can talk much more about like testing and the way that algorithms are like totally detectable by universities. And I think we’ve all become really accustomed to like the long dash. Like when I see that in a reply from someone…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which is tragic for me as a writer. I love the em dash. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There isn’t a uniform position by universities, right? So some universities are like, okay, if you’ve got particular needs, you can use AI. Other people are like under no circumstances do you use AI, and so the writers have been really able to exploit that lack of uniform position as part of a sales tactic to say, “Look, if use AI send your work to us, we will humanize it. We will remove all traces that you’ve had AI and we’ll send it back to you at a cost. It’ll cost you more because actually it requires more expertise to be able to spot all the falsifications, to spot the ways that AI hallucinates, to check all the references. We will do that detailed work and we will send it to you if you want to use AI. Or we can continue to do something bespoke for you.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think it has definitely shaped the way that they work because they’re getting many more students who are sending them things that they’ve used AI and said, “Can you make this look like I haven’t used AI,” and are charging them for that. Yet again, we’re in this world where we would rather think that AI has absolutely no human involvement than actually acknowledge the fact that it requires enormous amounts of human capital to make it happen in the first place. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that was the most interesting takeaway for me being a tech reporter watching the film was seeing the way that this industry of people adapted. Like Patricia said, this work is even more specialized than just writing the essay to make it sound human and to spot these kind of inconsistencies that only exist with AI. But at the same time, it seems to push them further into the shadows. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eloise King:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it really does. I think you’ve kind of hit on something that we found in this film. There was this perpetual loop that would happen where just at the moment you think there is a shift or reckoning that allows them to be seen and to be acknowledged, like there is another systemic move that further pushes them into the background. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think AI is kind of coalesces into two things, doesn’t it? It’s like, one, people would rather think that like robots and computers are going to like take over the world and they’re like so smart. But what it does is it comes up against an innate prejudice where people for years have thought that the “Africans” need to, and I use that like term because you know that’s how people use it in this sweeping term, like that they need to be educated, they need be taught how to be civilized, and actually what too many imaginations cannot hold is the reality that there are millions of educated people in the fastest growing youth population on the planet who are having access to technology that allows them to share their education. That was an inheritance of colonial settlements and imposed education systems. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so all of these things are totally intertwined. The prejudice that people think that they couldn’t be that smart to begin with and the prejudice that then denies when proof is beyond needing any more evidence that it still finds a way to deny them of this. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Many shadow scholars have pivoted to editing and humanizing AI-generated writing. But AI itself keeps advancing. There are now countless AI tools that claim to be able to humanize other AI-generated text in order to bypass AI detection tools. Right now, those tools still don’t compare to actual human-written work. But at some point in the future, will shadow scholars become redundant? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Patricia Kingori:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think they will continue to adapt in ways that we haven’t even thought about yet, because we haven t been able to predict how they’ve lasted this long in the face of all of these different challenges. So, as long as there is demand, there will be these writers and I think there will continue be demand because institutions need to find ways to judge who is good or who isn’t good. And so I think that’s an important thing for us to think about. Is it possible that we can have a world where these qualifications start to mean something different, right, and who is good or not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Shadow scholars have been fighting for recognition long before AI was a problem. Even though the documentary conceals individual writers’ identities, Eloise hopes that it at least makes more people aware of the industry. It’s not mysterious criminals powering essay mills, but real writers who are forced into the shadows because they don’t have the same opportunities as students in the global North.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This documentary is also a kind of reckoning for academia. What does it mean for these institutions, if they’re awarding degrees and certifications to people who didn’t actually do the work to get them? And the people who did do the work are prevented from entering those very institutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Next week, we’ll look at how this is playing out with younger students as we dive into how teachers are handling AI in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The documentary, “The Shadow Scholars,” hits UK theaters on September 18th. For updates on this and further screenings, follow @ShadowScholarsFilm on Instagram. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For now, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva, and edited by Chris Egusa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Chris Hambrick and Jen Chien, who is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Our audio engineer is Brendan Willard. Original music, including our theme song and credits, by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsay is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ok, and I know it’s podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives, and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Don’t forget to drop a comment and tell your friends, too. Or even your enemies! Or… frenemies? Your support is so important, especially in these \u003cem>unprecedented times\u003c/em>. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to Donate.KQED.org/podcasts!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also! We want to hear from you! Email us CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram at “close all tabs pod.” Or TikTok at “close all tabs.” And join our Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at Discord.gg/KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have you heard of the “Gen Z stare”? It’s the blank look some Gen Zers seem to give instead of the usual greetings or small talk—and it’s the latest skirmish in a years-long generation war between Gen Z and Millennials. Internet culture researcher Aidan Walker joins Morgan to trace the origins of this rivalry, unpack what behavioral quirks like “the Gen Z stare” and “the Millennial pause” reveal about each generation’s relationship with technology, and explore why everyone seems to forget about Gen X. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC5336355522\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aidanwalker.info/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aidan Walker\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, independent writer, content creator, and internet culture researcher\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/nx-s1-5468597/gen-z-stare-tiktok-explained-meme-expert-trend-viral\">Is the ‘Gen Z stare’ just a call to look inward?\u003c/a>\u003ci> — \u003c/i>Manuela López Restrepo and Mia Venkat, \u003ci>NPR\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/27/gen-z-stare-its-got-nothing-on-the-gen-x-look-of-dread\">Have you been a victim of the ‘gen Z stare’? It’s got nothing on the gen X look of dread\u003c/a> — Emma Beddington, \u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/gen-z-stare-explainer-rcna219262\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z is staring at you. It may be more than just a quirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Kalhan Rosenblatt, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NBC News\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are on the heels of yet another battle. The two factions, once united against a common enemy, have been attacking each other for nearly half a decade. And by attack, I mean they’re calling each other cringe. This is the war between Gen Z and Millennials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z is on the defensive in this latest skirmish as they fight accusations of the Gen Z stare. It’s that blank, glassy gaze that young people have in lieu of socially acceptable small talk. On social media, millennials and Gen Xers have complained about the Gen Z stare in meetings with colleagues, in customer service interactions, and pretty much every social exchange in a public space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brooke (@nolablest2020): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re talking about the stare when anyone tries to have just a normal human interaction with you like in the flesh and you guys freeze the f**k up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katherine Burleson (@katherineburleson0): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People are going back and forth and Gen Z’s like, “No it’s like an are you serious like are you dumb type of stare.” And other people are like, “No it’s almost like a blank look are you even there?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To be fair, sometimes the Gen Z stare is warranted. If you’ve ever worked in customer service, you know exactly what I mean. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Natalie Reynolds (@natalie.reynolds178): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, the strawberry banana smoothie does have banana in it, unfortunately. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Gen Z has been making fun of millennials for years, too. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>@she_legacy1: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have you guys ever noticed that when older people post videos and by older, I mean like, maybe like 35, 40s and on, they always start the video. They wait like one, two, three seconds to make sure it’s filming and then they smile and then they start talking. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Where did this war between Gen Z and Millennials really start? What can this seemingly eternal fight tell us about the ways each generation has been shaped by the internet? And amid all of these petty generational spats, why does everyone forget about Gen X? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so I have something to confess. I am a cusper, or zillennial, or whatever you wanna call that generational cohort that was born too late to count as a millennial and too early to really be Gen Z. So in the seemingly eternal war between the two groups, I’ve always been a double agent. Joining me to unpack this generational war today is another double agent, Aidan Walker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I’d say I’m an internet culture researcher and historian. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In addition to his actual academic research on memes, Aidan also breaks down these cultural trends on TikTok as @Aidanetcetera, and on his sub stack, How To Do Things with Memes. Before we get into this generational warfare, I’m very curious, what generation do you most closely identify with? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m cusp. I’m like between the two. I guess I’m like an elder Gen Z. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Same, I’m like, yeah, either the oldest of the Gen Z or the youngest of the millennials. And in my many years of covering this ongoing warfare, I’ve been a spy for both sides. I’ve faking it this whole time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I’ll say this, I’m not sure that there’s specific battles in the Gen Z millennial war that are going to be sung of by the bards. I think it’s often been a cold war at certain points. I think its been kind of like a war of attrition. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’re going to look at the origins of this cold war, starting with a new tab. The Great Millennial Gen Z War. This war didn’t begin with any public declaration. In fact, this generational tension started way, way before skinny jeans were cringe. Back in 2012, Tide Pods hit the market. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They have bright colors. They look like a kind of heart candy. And it’s just the most delicious thing, but it’s also the forbidden fruit of all time because “They,” capital T, “They” tell you that if you eat a Tide Pod, you will be unalived, as a Gen Z person would say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the years that followed, poison control centers reported that thousands of young children had eaten the tempting, but deadly, laundry pots. Eating Tide Pods kind of became a joke online. And so, by 2018, the Tide Pot Challenge was born. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dominic Beesley (@dominicbeesley8589): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hey guys, what’s up, Dominic here, and in today’s video I’ll be doing the Tide Pod challenge where you bite into a Tide pod… did you really think i was gonna eat a tide pod?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Media outlets warned parents of the lethal Tide Pod craze sweeping the internet. And although some teenagers did actually record themselves trying to eat TidePods, social media and mainstream press coverage very quickly blew it out of proportion. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well what began as a social media joke is leading to some serious concerns from doctors tonight. It involves teenagers appearing to eat laundry detergent pods and posting the pictures on social media. Photos show the pods being used as pizza toppings or a bowl of them mixed with bleach for breakfast. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The vast majority of teenagers were not guzzling down Tide Pods, but they were making and liking memes about being tempted by Tide Pods, which only fueled the hysteria. Some millennials, meanwhile, distanced themselves from the antics of Gen Z. This is where we really start to see the rift between generations form online. The relationship was briefly mended in 2019 when the phrase, “okay boomer” blew up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Kuli and Jedwill: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He gonna take over the mic. Okay boomer, okay okay boomer. Okay boomer. Okay boomer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For a few beautiful months, Millennials and Gen Z were a united front against the baby boomers, or really anyone they perceived as a boomer. It was the perfect comeback. If someone online had a bad out-of-touch take, Millennials on Gen Z would hit back with, “okay, boomer.” For a while, there was peace. And then the COVID pandemic started and the internet evolved. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s Corona Time! Hey, it’s Corona time right now! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So COVID is this moment that disrupts all of our lives. For Gen Z, COVID is this thing that happens before your life has really begun. Maybe you’re in high school, maybe you’re college, maybe you are like the first or second year out of college. And it becomes this thing where you’re like entering the world and you see the world ending kind of in a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But for millennials, I feel like they were maybe a little bit more established. And so it became this sudden, like, ghostly pause where you were working from home for a year or two. And I think for both groups, it was very hard in different ways. But I think it’s when you start to see the glaring difference. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I feel like COVID happened 2020. TikTok is the hottest social media platform and it’s like mostly Gen Z on TikTok. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Feelin’ shitty in my bed, didn’t take my fucking meds. The beat, sound to the beat…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like that’s when Gen Z started to really gain this kind of cultural capital online. How might that start to stoke the tensions between generations? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It changes the format of online culture. It’s now things start on vertical video, then they trickle out to the other platforms. And TikTok is dominated by these young kids, so all these young kids are video editors and they’re able to start putting their own mark on things. I think it really was a moment where suddenly the cutting edge of internet culture is a little bit younger than it was before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you talk about this resistance that a lot of millennials had to using TikTok at first, if you remember back then? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember it because I had that resistance as well. It was the first social media app where I didn’t feel native to it right away. I was just kind of, it’s almost too fast, you know, it had this bad rap, like in the boomer press, people are like, “Oh, it’s Chinese intelligence, mining our data.” And it just sort of felt as if I didn’t t need it in my life, or there would be a bit of a learning curve to get into it. And, uh, of course now I’m, uh… I guess a TikTok influencer to some extent. So I did end up adopting it. But it just was this alienating moment where you sort of realize, “I grew up with the internet and now the internet has grown past me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also see fashion trends moving on, like side parts are supposedly out, middle parts are in. Skinny jeans, people are ditching those, like post-COVID, no one wants to wear skinny jeans after quarantine. And moving on from this almost seems like a rejection of like the millennial fashion. How did millennials react to this? Because I didn’t think it was that deep, but if you look at media coverage, it was like, “Oh my God.” You’d expect like a massacre of skinny jeans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, it is that deep for some people because I think we have such a weird fixation on youth in our culture. So it’s really an existential crisis for people to feel themselves move from like one demographic category to another. You know, you’re sitting there looking at your skinny jeans and you’ve just turned 30. And it’s like, it’s time to let them go. And it not just that you’re going through that sort of private process. It’s that you see someone 10 years younger than you on TikTok when you open your phone mocking you for it. And so I understand why people felt hurt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Millennials defended themselves with an arsenal of clap back songs? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Arise (@aliciaarise): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m about to be a millennial with my side part and skinny jeans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Serena Terry: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you think we’re old? Well I ain’t having that. We give you wifi and we can take it back \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mikki Hommel (@mikkihommel.music): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was born in 1985, side part and and skinny jeans, and I overused the laugh emoji.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By 2022, Gen Z had become very adept at rage-baiting millennials. Rage-bait is exactly what it sounds like. It’s content deliberately made to provoke anger so that viewers respond and it drives up engagement. It’s pivotal in this war between generations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, anything that is a controversy does well on the internet. That’s like a fundamental law that everybody knows. And so I think why the generational rage bait begins is first of all, it does numbers for those reasons. And secondly, it kind of helps people to establish their own identity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, this is a time where Gen Z is just distinguishing itself from millennials. And so the way you do that is by, you know, kind of aggressively saying like, “They wear skinny jeans.” Like these sorts of things that may be cosmetic, but you know, when you’re very nascent in figuring out your identity, they mean a lot to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By the early 2020s, the difference in the way that millennials and Gen Z interact with the internet and with technology also becomes very clear. There’s the dreaded millennial pause, which is that dead air at the beginning of a video before someone starts talking. Usually it’s because they started recording, but they pause to check that it’s recording and they don’t edit that out. And then there’s the inverse, which is the Gen Z shake. Do you wanna explain what that is? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z shake, and I’ve seen millennials do it too, so it’s not just limited to that, is when you start a recording, but you kind of do it in such a way that it seems like you just threw your phone down on the table. Like, suddenly you had this opinion about Taylor Swift and you just couldn’t hold it in. You’re about to head out the door, but you press record and the phone’s not even on the the table, and so the entire screen shakes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you sit down and you say, “guys,” and you’re just unburdened yourself. And it’s kind of like a faked casualness because you imagine them. You know, setting the phone down on the table several times, you know, over the course of different takes doing this video. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But what do these two habits, the millennial pause and the Gen Z shake, of which I am both guilty. I mean, honestly, I’ve done both, I’m not gonna lie. But what can they tell us about the way that each generation performs online? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So with the millennial pause, the first thing it tells you is they aren’t as good at editing themselves on video or it isn’t as natural to them. But I think what the millennia pause really says to me is it’s that moment where you see the difference between the offstage persona that is like setting up the recording that is sitting in their kitchen and then the onstage persona that is giving the take that is saying the thing they’ve planned to say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And because you see that transition, you know that the take is scripted somehow, you know, that it’s the real them, but it’s the them that they’ve curated and made. And it feels almost like someone wearing like an untucked shirt or something to a business meeting. You know, it’s like everybody knows that it doesn’t really matter. But like, you tuck in the shirt, that’s just the way it’s done. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, you go in cap cut and you just shave off your half a second. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, you make it seem seamless so that as a viewer, I can forget that everything is fake. And the Gen Z shake is of course equally fake and inauthentic, but it’s seamless. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Though there have been a few developments in the last year, similar to the skinny jeans debacle, crew socks are very popular with Gen Z. Millennials are very defensive of their ankle socks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then we also saw millennials taking digs against Gen Z. There was a whole debate over, you know, whether Gen Z is aging faster than millennials did, that kind of thing. And it just feels like every single one of these developments is just like another petty dig that honestly could apply to either generation. What do you think? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think they are petty digs. I think that they tie into real anxieties about aging that people have. I also think it’s worth mentioning that technically generations are fake. They’re a thing we made up. Everything’s a social construct, right? But generations are a little more socially constructed than some other things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so I think often what we’re dealing with are these anxieties around aging and then anxieties about social media itself and how it’s changing and how fast it’s changing. And people do get a certain amount of like, identity affirmation out of fighting people that aren’t like them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Speaking of identity groups and anxiety about aging, where is Gen X in all of this? We’ll talk about that after this break. Okay, new tab. What about Gen X? Let’s talk about Gen X throwing their hat in the ring, trying to join the fight. Do you remember Gen X Rise? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. It was Gen-Xers venerating their own culture’s uniqueness and importance. It was a lot of like Star Wars. It’s a lot like 80s kid type references. It was lot of Gen X, you know, asserting space on the internet. And I can’t really enter into the mindset of a Gen Xer. But I think a piece of it is they probably have always kind of felt outsiders on this. I think a lot of them only got online maybe in like the late 2010s when it became a mainstream adult thing for people to do and then now they want to clean their little corner of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just remember from the trend, it was like in the middle of the whole Gen Z-millennial, you know, going at each other and all these making all these petty jabs. And then you’d be scrolling through all these videos of millennials and Gen Z fighting and then the middle would just be like… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen X Rise. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re here, too, like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically, yeah. And so I just think it’s very funny that Gen Z and Millennials put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. And by fight, I mean make cringe compilations. Can you talk about how cringe is like wielded in generation wars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cringe is the weapon of choice in Generation Wars, I would say, calling the other side cringe, compiling examples of them having done it and editing it with like a jaunty soundtrack. Cringe like is always in the eye of the beholder, you know, and so you really I think create cringe by having enough beholders agree with you that it is cringe. There is an element to it though, particularly with millennial cringe. That is centered around like seeing through or around the performance. I’m thinking of like the stomp clap music. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Lumineers: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ho! Hey!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Lumineers style, right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Lumineers style, that’s sort of become cringe now because it’s so sincere and yet it’s sincere in a way that it’s overly performative. You aren’t from the holler, you’re like a dude in Brooklyn and that’s what gets cringed is when people try too hard. And then the genius of the cringe tactic as an offensive kind of move against an enemy is that because it’s trying too hard if they try to defend themselves, they’re, again, trying too hard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Going back to Gen X Rise and all that, you know, Gen X is so often forgotten online that it’s become a meme in itself. Why do you think that entire generation is, yeah, just so often overlooked and forgotten about online? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think Gen X is forgotten. I think demographically, they’re smaller than the other generations. So that’s one piece of it. Another part of it is that there’s not as much of like a meme trail there. Like one of the weird things about these fights between Gen Z and millennials is that they kind of like make each other through the fight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, so the things that millennials say, “Oh, that’s a Gen Z trait,” or the things the Gen Z says, “Oh, That’s a millennial trait.” And I don’t know if Gen X was ever that closely watched or faught with by millennials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I also wonder how much of it is like you can’t use cringe against them as effectively because Gen X just doesn’t have as much of a digital footprint as millennials did. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We don’t have the receipts, yeah. We have like, yeah, we have like the music video of Kurt Cobain, but we don’t have the posts of all the people trying to do grunge culture on- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When they’re 15 from their bedrooms, we see it in movies, it’s less raw, there’s less of a record and so Gen X escapes scrutiny that way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once upon a time, older generations referred to millennials as the lazy, entitled generation. But it seems like every time a new generation ages into young adulthood, it’s their turn to be scrutinized. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that brings us back to the most recent skirmish in this generational war. The Gen Z stare. Let’s open a new tab. What’s up with the Gen Z stare? Okay, so let’s talk about the Gen Z stare. What is it? How would you describe it? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z stare is just… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s not dead air. Aiden has this vacant slack expression as if he was just factory reset. He’s doing the Gen Z stare. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blank face. You know, someone’s just looking at you just a long pause and their brain is either buffering or processing or they’re dissociating, staring off into space. The context that people saw it most often come up was like customer service type things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I guess like the stereotypical interaction would be some millennial or Gen X is like getting a coffee. And then they say they want, you know, sugar in it or something, or like a certain type of pump. And then the barista who’s Gen Z just kind of looks at them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it’s this like, they’re not quite housebroken in a way for like public social interactions is the Gen Z stare. You know, they aren’t able to like interface fully or they don’t recognize when it’s their turn to talk essentially. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, a lot of people have blamed like the pandemic as these like this most formative time in childhood development is, but you’re kept in isolation, you know, and your only interactions are online. But you had your own theory, which you posted about. Can you explain that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, my own theory was that if the millennial pause is you’re seeing the shift between offstage to onstage, so they’re performing too much, the Gen Z stare is like a refusal to perform. It is a total like, “Okay, I’m not going to make the small talk. I’m not going to ask the follow-up question. I’m just here and people are gonna help me because I’m in public and I’m here, I’m a customer,” or whatever it is. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve been thinking about it in terms of like, if you go to a downtown of like any major city in the U.S. and you go look at the lunch places, they’re all like slop bowl places for the most part. And you think of how much human interaction actually happens, like you could be ordering from a screen. And the idea is just you go and you get your food, you leave. And I think so many public spaces are like that, that the etiquette is essentially like being on a train or a bus. If you’re on the subway and you don’t really talk to people, like that’s not proper. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think it’s almost like Gen Z sees all IRL public space like the subway in a way where it doesn’t make sense, you know, to have a small talk interaction, you know, this sort of asocial — COVID being the intensifier of it, you know, when really we were so distant from each other. I think it’s downstream of that. Like Gen Z just doesn’t see public space the same way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. I mean, because so much interaction with strangers, with people who aren’t directly in your life just happens online anyway. Whereas previous generations, like, yeah, like I guess boomers and maybe like some Gen Xers were like really into small talk because they didn’t have the internet. They didn’t social media. And now it’s like, well, you’re getting all that interaction anyway, just in a different way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly, yeah, like the example I said in the video was I was at a cracker barrel at this point, like a month or two ago, and I was traveling on the road to elsewhere. And at the table next to us, like a booth next to us, there’s an older couple sitting there, a man and a woman. And another old man walks by and the two old men recognize each other. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they start having this small talk conversation about, you know, one guy’s brother going into a home and then sort of they’re catching up. It occurs to me that these two old guys don’t seem to know each other very well. I’m almost imagining that it’s the kind of thing like maybe they went to high school together or something in this same small town and they’ve had a marginal relationship their entire lives, have known of each other’s existence, been in the same network, or maybe they were co-workers somewhere before they were retired. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that this conversation of the two of them talking and taking the time to stop in the cracker barrel to have this pleasantry exchange is actually how this one guy is going to find out about this other guy’s brother going to a home. You know, it’s how they’re going to find out how people they know are doing. It’s how they’re gonna find out what’s happening in the community, because their intel about their social environment is made up of these interactions that happen in these public spaces. Whether it’s Cracker Barrel, whether it’s church, whether, you know, the store. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the fact that Gen Z doesn’t have that, it sort of occurred to me that, you know, I’m not sure I would have that conversation with someone I knew marginally that I went to high school, but I haven’t really talked to since. I would probably pretend I didn’t notice them in a public space. And it’s because if I want that data, I go on Instagram and I see, okay, she’s getting married. Her fiance looks nice. Haven’t seen her in eight years. Happy for her. You know, like there’s this kind of immediacy, but also it happens through the platforms. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know you no longer need these specially made places for it. And so the Cracker Barrel just becomes a place to eat for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z stare is a refusal to use public space as public space. It’s. Treating it as private space, right? You’re just there to get what you want to get to fulfill the particular function. And you’re not gonna put on the front of saying, oh, how was the weather? How are you doing? If you’re just gonna say, how do I get from point A to point B? And you gonna save your emotional labor, I guess your social presentation for the platforms where you actually have more of a chance to control it and more of chance to choose where it goes and who it’s going to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does the Gen Z stare tell us about… us? Well, instead of being expected to perform social niceties all the time, a lot of younger generations choose when and how they want to be perceived. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But maybe there is something lost in the way we socialize now. Everything online is so curated, and there is some thing about the messiness of spontaneous real-life connections that feels very human. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then again, the Gen Z stare could just be a sign that people are finding this kind of connection online instead. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s be real. Every generation has been hated on and criticized by previous generations. It’s just how things go. But things are different now. The internet and the way we’re constantly consuming and participating in content puts each generation under more of a microscope. It amplifies the tension between each group. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we often see these arguments end with, you know, Gen Z expressing anger over the current economic and labor conditions that they’ve grown into, you know that they have aged into. But millennials, aren’t necessarily the ones to blame because they also faced very, you now, tumultuous economic and labor conditions when they aged into adulthood. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z probably hates the boomers more than millennials, just as I’m sure millennials kind of know the boomers are… If you, I think if you were to do polling, that’s what people would say would be my suspicion. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I think the economic angle of it is important because if COVID for Gen Z was this moment kind of before their adult life began, where it kind of threw the whole thing in doubt. And for millennials, it was, you know, they, this sort of hard one stability or you know, first few steps on the path of life that suddenly get derailed or jostled around. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So are these markers of cultural conflicts really just a distraction from the realities of, you know, the world right now with these very precarious and unpredictable economic and social changes? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think what makes them feel a little bit more serious is the way that young people feel disempowered today as all these changes are coming down the pike. I mean, not to be like the gerontocracy guy or banging that drum constantly, but it seems like a lot of the people in charge at high levels or even at like medium levels are going to hang on and they have economic incentives to do so as well. You know, it’s getting more difficult to be a retired person. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it feels a little like Gen Z and millennials to a lesser extent are through their voices online sort of trying to assert a kind of power that is largely unavailable to them, because our whole lives I think we kind of grew up knowing this tsunami of whatever is coming, whether it’s the AI apocalypse or climate change or whatever is arriving. And it’s like, actually, no, just keep playing on the beach, the adults are going to do something about it. And now it’s sort of like Let us grab the wheel, let us grab the wheel. Come on, guys, and it’s not happening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This whole thing really picked up when Gen Z aged into adulthood and started taking over spaces that had been ruled by millennials. They didn’t just usurp millennial territories, but started carving out new ones too, places that millennials might’ve been hesitant to explore but have eventually settled into. Take TikTok, for example. A Pew Research study last year found that TikTok’s 35 to 49 demographic is actually growing faster than its 18 to 34 users. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But a new faction is gaining power more quickly than millennials or Gen Z ever did. And everyone seems to be a little bit scared of them. They’re built different. They’ve been online since birth. They communicate in emojis before they can even read. And their memes are weirder. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Skibidi Toilet: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What the heck is goin’ on, on, you, on Brrrr Skibidibobobobo, yes, yes Skibidibobo the neem, neem \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s only a matter of time before Gen Alpha takes over the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think Gen Z is going to react worse to the rise of Gen Alpha than millennials reacted to the Gen Z. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why is that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cuz I think for Gen Z, the identity is a little even more tied into the internet than for millennials. I think, for GenZ, they have this sense that, oh, they’re the weirdest, they’re the most special. So I think as Gen Alpha rises and they get into niche memes that Gen Z doesn’t understand, I think that the sense that the meme cultural capital is with Gen Alpha will be much more re-stabilizing. I think Gen Alpha is also much more like, doesn’t need us, and that’s the most annoying thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re so self-sufficient. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They don’t need us at all, yeah. They’re like little aliens and they sit there on their iPads or you know watch their Roblox or their Bluey or whatever and there’s just- there’s just no engagement or like need to listen to us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for joining us, Aidan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Let’s c\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">lose all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Egusa. Sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback, or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram @CloseAllTabsPod, or drop it on Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at discord.gg/KQED. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have you heard of the “Gen Z stare”? It’s the blank look some Gen Zers seem to give instead of the usual greetings or small talk—and it’s the latest skirmish in a years-long generation war between Gen Z and Millennials. Internet culture researcher Aidan Walker joins Morgan to trace the origins of this rivalry, unpack what behavioral quirks like “the Gen Z stare” and “the Millennial pause” reveal about each generation’s relationship with technology, and explore why everyone seems to forget about Gen X. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC5336355522\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Guests: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.aidanwalker.info/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Aidan Walker\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, independent writer, content creator, and internet culture researcher\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further reading/listening: \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/nx-s1-5468597/gen-z-stare-tiktok-explained-meme-expert-trend-viral\">Is the ‘Gen Z stare’ just a call to look inward?\u003c/a>\u003ci> — \u003c/i>Manuela López Restrepo and Mia Venkat, \u003ci>NPR\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/27/gen-z-stare-its-got-nothing-on-the-gen-x-look-of-dread\">Have you been a victim of the ‘gen Z stare’? It’s got nothing on the gen X look of dread\u003c/a> — Emma Beddington, \u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/gen-z-stare-explainer-rcna219262\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z is staring at you. It may be more than just a quirk.\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Kalhan Rosenblatt, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">NBC News\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Follow us on Instagram\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci data-stringify-type=\"italic\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are on the heels of yet another battle. The two factions, once united against a common enemy, have been attacking each other for nearly half a decade. And by attack, I mean they’re calling each other cringe. This is the war between Gen Z and Millennials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z is on the defensive in this latest skirmish as they fight accusations of the Gen Z stare. It’s that blank, glassy gaze that young people have in lieu of socially acceptable small talk. On social media, millennials and Gen Xers have complained about the Gen Z stare in meetings with colleagues, in customer service interactions, and pretty much every social exchange in a public space. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Brooke (@nolablest2020): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re talking about the stare when anyone tries to have just a normal human interaction with you like in the flesh and you guys freeze the f**k up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Katherine Burleson (@katherineburleson0): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People are going back and forth and Gen Z’s like, “No it’s like an are you serious like are you dumb type of stare.” And other people are like, “No it’s almost like a blank look are you even there?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">To be fair, sometimes the Gen Z stare is warranted. If you’ve ever worked in customer service, you know exactly what I mean. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Natalie Reynolds (@natalie.reynolds178): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes, the strawberry banana smoothie does have banana in it, unfortunately. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And Gen Z has been making fun of millennials for years, too. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>@she_legacy1: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Have you guys ever noticed that when older people post videos and by older, I mean like, maybe like 35, 40s and on, they always start the video. They wait like one, two, three seconds to make sure it’s filming and then they smile and then they start talking. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Where did this war between Gen Z and Millennials really start? What can this seemingly eternal fight tell us about the ways each generation has been shaped by the internet? And amid all of these petty generational spats, why does everyone forget about Gen X? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, so I have something to confess. I am a cusper, or zillennial, or whatever you wanna call that generational cohort that was born too late to count as a millennial and too early to really be Gen Z. So in the seemingly eternal war between the two groups, I’ve always been a double agent. Joining me to unpack this generational war today is another double agent, Aidan Walker. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I’d say I’m an internet culture researcher and historian. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In addition to his actual academic research on memes, Aidan also breaks down these cultural trends on TikTok as @Aidanetcetera, and on his sub stack, How To Do Things with Memes. Before we get into this generational warfare, I’m very curious, what generation do you most closely identify with? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m cusp. I’m like between the two. I guess I’m like an elder Gen Z. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Same, I’m like, yeah, either the oldest of the Gen Z or the youngest of the millennials. And in my many years of covering this ongoing warfare, I’ve been a spy for both sides. I’ve faking it this whole time. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I’ll say this, I’m not sure that there’s specific battles in the Gen Z millennial war that are going to be sung of by the bards. I think it’s often been a cold war at certain points. I think its been kind of like a war of attrition. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we’re going to look at the origins of this cold war, starting with a new tab. The Great Millennial Gen Z War. This war didn’t begin with any public declaration. In fact, this generational tension started way, way before skinny jeans were cringe. Back in 2012, Tide Pods hit the market. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They have bright colors. They look like a kind of heart candy. And it’s just the most delicious thing, but it’s also the forbidden fruit of all time because “They,” capital T, “They” tell you that if you eat a Tide Pod, you will be unalived, as a Gen Z person would say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the years that followed, poison control centers reported that thousands of young children had eaten the tempting, but deadly, laundry pots. Eating Tide Pods kind of became a joke online. And so, by 2018, the Tide Pot Challenge was born. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dominic Beesley (@dominicbeesley8589): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Hey guys, what’s up, Dominic here, and in today’s video I’ll be doing the Tide Pod challenge where you bite into a Tide pod… did you really think i was gonna eat a tide pod?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Media outlets warned parents of the lethal Tide Pod craze sweeping the internet. And although some teenagers did actually record themselves trying to eat TidePods, social media and mainstream press coverage very quickly blew it out of proportion. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>News Anchor: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well what began as a social media joke is leading to some serious concerns from doctors tonight. It involves teenagers appearing to eat laundry detergent pods and posting the pictures on social media. Photos show the pods being used as pizza toppings or a bowl of them mixed with bleach for breakfast. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The vast majority of teenagers were not guzzling down Tide Pods, but they were making and liking memes about being tempted by Tide Pods, which only fueled the hysteria. Some millennials, meanwhile, distanced themselves from the antics of Gen Z. This is where we really start to see the rift between generations form online. The relationship was briefly mended in 2019 when the phrase, “okay boomer” blew up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Kuli and Jedwill: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He gonna take over the mic. Okay boomer, okay okay boomer. Okay boomer. Okay boomer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For a few beautiful months, Millennials and Gen Z were a united front against the baby boomers, or really anyone they perceived as a boomer. It was the perfect comeback. If someone online had a bad out-of-touch take, Millennials on Gen Z would hit back with, “okay, boomer.” For a while, there was peace. And then the COVID pandemic started and the internet evolved. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s Corona Time! Hey, it’s Corona time right now! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So COVID is this moment that disrupts all of our lives. For Gen Z, COVID is this thing that happens before your life has really begun. Maybe you’re in high school, maybe you’re college, maybe you are like the first or second year out of college. And it becomes this thing where you’re like entering the world and you see the world ending kind of in a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But for millennials, I feel like they were maybe a little bit more established. And so it became this sudden, like, ghostly pause where you were working from home for a year or two. And I think for both groups, it was very hard in different ways. But I think it’s when you start to see the glaring difference. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I feel like COVID happened 2020. TikTok is the hottest social media platform and it’s like mostly Gen Z on TikTok. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Feelin’ shitty in my bed, didn’t take my fucking meds. The beat, sound to the beat…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel like that’s when Gen Z started to really gain this kind of cultural capital online. How might that start to stoke the tensions between generations? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It changes the format of online culture. It’s now things start on vertical video, then they trickle out to the other platforms. And TikTok is dominated by these young kids, so all these young kids are video editors and they’re able to start putting their own mark on things. I think it really was a moment where suddenly the cutting edge of internet culture is a little bit younger than it was before. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Can you talk about this resistance that a lot of millennials had to using TikTok at first, if you remember back then? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I remember it because I had that resistance as well. It was the first social media app where I didn’t feel native to it right away. I was just kind of, it’s almost too fast, you know, it had this bad rap, like in the boomer press, people are like, “Oh, it’s Chinese intelligence, mining our data.” And it just sort of felt as if I didn’t t need it in my life, or there would be a bit of a learning curve to get into it. And, uh, of course now I’m, uh… I guess a TikTok influencer to some extent. So I did end up adopting it. But it just was this alienating moment where you sort of realize, “I grew up with the internet and now the internet has grown past me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We also see fashion trends moving on, like side parts are supposedly out, middle parts are in. Skinny jeans, people are ditching those, like post-COVID, no one wants to wear skinny jeans after quarantine. And moving on from this almost seems like a rejection of like the millennial fashion. How did millennials react to this? Because I didn’t think it was that deep, but if you look at media coverage, it was like, “Oh my God.” You’d expect like a massacre of skinny jeans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, it is that deep for some people because I think we have such a weird fixation on youth in our culture. So it’s really an existential crisis for people to feel themselves move from like one demographic category to another. You know, you’re sitting there looking at your skinny jeans and you’ve just turned 30. And it’s like, it’s time to let them go. And it not just that you’re going through that sort of private process. It’s that you see someone 10 years younger than you on TikTok when you open your phone mocking you for it. And so I understand why people felt hurt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Millennials defended themselves with an arsenal of clap back songs? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alicia Arise (@aliciaarise): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m about to be a millennial with my side part and skinny jeans. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Serena Terry: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So you think we’re old? Well I ain’t having that. We give you wifi and we can take it back \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mikki Hommel (@mikkihommel.music): \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was born in 1985, side part and and skinny jeans, and I overused the laugh emoji.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By 2022, Gen Z had become very adept at rage-baiting millennials. Rage-bait is exactly what it sounds like. It’s content deliberately made to provoke anger so that viewers respond and it drives up engagement. It’s pivotal in this war between generations. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, anything that is a controversy does well on the internet. That’s like a fundamental law that everybody knows. And so I think why the generational rage bait begins is first of all, it does numbers for those reasons. And secondly, it kind of helps people to establish their own identity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, this is a time where Gen Z is just distinguishing itself from millennials. And so the way you do that is by, you know, kind of aggressively saying like, “They wear skinny jeans.” Like these sorts of things that may be cosmetic, but you know, when you’re very nascent in figuring out your identity, they mean a lot to you. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">By the early 2020s, the difference in the way that millennials and Gen Z interact with the internet and with technology also becomes very clear. There’s the dreaded millennial pause, which is that dead air at the beginning of a video before someone starts talking. Usually it’s because they started recording, but they pause to check that it’s recording and they don’t edit that out. And then there’s the inverse, which is the Gen Z shake. Do you wanna explain what that is? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z shake, and I’ve seen millennials do it too, so it’s not just limited to that, is when you start a recording, but you kind of do it in such a way that it seems like you just threw your phone down on the table. Like, suddenly you had this opinion about Taylor Swift and you just couldn’t hold it in. You’re about to head out the door, but you press record and the phone’s not even on the the table, and so the entire screen shakes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you sit down and you say, “guys,” and you’re just unburdened yourself. And it’s kind of like a faked casualness because you imagine them. You know, setting the phone down on the table several times, you know, over the course of different takes doing this video. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But what do these two habits, the millennial pause and the Gen Z shake, of which I am both guilty. I mean, honestly, I’ve done both, I’m not gonna lie. But what can they tell us about the way that each generation performs online? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So with the millennial pause, the first thing it tells you is they aren’t as good at editing themselves on video or it isn’t as natural to them. But I think what the millennia pause really says to me is it’s that moment where you see the difference between the offstage persona that is like setting up the recording that is sitting in their kitchen and then the onstage persona that is giving the take that is saying the thing they’ve planned to say. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And because you see that transition, you know that the take is scripted somehow, you know, that it’s the real them, but it’s the them that they’ve curated and made. And it feels almost like someone wearing like an untucked shirt or something to a business meeting. You know, it’s like everybody knows that it doesn’t really matter. But like, you tuck in the shirt, that’s just the way it’s done. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, you go in cap cut and you just shave off your half a second. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, you make it seem seamless so that as a viewer, I can forget that everything is fake. And the Gen Z shake is of course equally fake and inauthentic, but it’s seamless. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Though there have been a few developments in the last year, similar to the skinny jeans debacle, crew socks are very popular with Gen Z. Millennials are very defensive of their ankle socks. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then we also saw millennials taking digs against Gen Z. There was a whole debate over, you know, whether Gen Z is aging faster than millennials did, that kind of thing. And it just feels like every single one of these developments is just like another petty dig that honestly could apply to either generation. What do you think? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think they are petty digs. I think that they tie into real anxieties about aging that people have. I also think it’s worth mentioning that technically generations are fake. They’re a thing we made up. Everything’s a social construct, right? But generations are a little more socially constructed than some other things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so I think often what we’re dealing with are these anxieties around aging and then anxieties about social media itself and how it’s changing and how fast it’s changing. And people do get a certain amount of like, identity affirmation out of fighting people that aren’t like them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Speaking of identity groups and anxiety about aging, where is Gen X in all of this? We’ll talk about that after this break. Okay, new tab. What about Gen X? Let’s talk about Gen X throwing their hat in the ring, trying to join the fight. Do you remember Gen X Rise? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes. It was Gen-Xers venerating their own culture’s uniqueness and importance. It was a lot of like Star Wars. It’s a lot like 80s kid type references. It was lot of Gen X, you know, asserting space on the internet. And I can’t really enter into the mindset of a Gen Xer. But I think a piece of it is they probably have always kind of felt outsiders on this. I think a lot of them only got online maybe in like the late 2010s when it became a mainstream adult thing for people to do and then now they want to clean their little corner of it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just remember from the trend, it was like in the middle of the whole Gen Z-millennial, you know, going at each other and all these making all these petty jabs. And then you’d be scrolling through all these videos of millennials and Gen Z fighting and then the middle would just be like… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>TikTok: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen X Rise. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re here, too, like. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Basically, yeah. And so I just think it’s very funny that Gen Z and Millennials put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. And by fight, I mean make cringe compilations. Can you talk about how cringe is like wielded in generation wars? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cringe is the weapon of choice in Generation Wars, I would say, calling the other side cringe, compiling examples of them having done it and editing it with like a jaunty soundtrack. Cringe like is always in the eye of the beholder, you know, and so you really I think create cringe by having enough beholders agree with you that it is cringe. There is an element to it though, particularly with millennial cringe. That is centered around like seeing through or around the performance. I’m thinking of like the stomp clap music. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Lumineers: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ho! Hey!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Lumineers style, right. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Lumineers style, that’s sort of become cringe now because it’s so sincere and yet it’s sincere in a way that it’s overly performative. You aren’t from the holler, you’re like a dude in Brooklyn and that’s what gets cringed is when people try too hard. And then the genius of the cringe tactic as an offensive kind of move against an enemy is that because it’s trying too hard if they try to defend themselves, they’re, again, trying too hard. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Going back to Gen X Rise and all that, you know, Gen X is so often forgotten online that it’s become a meme in itself. Why do you think that entire generation is, yeah, just so often overlooked and forgotten about online? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think Gen X is forgotten. I think demographically, they’re smaller than the other generations. So that’s one piece of it. Another part of it is that there’s not as much of like a meme trail there. Like one of the weird things about these fights between Gen Z and millennials is that they kind of like make each other through the fight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, so the things that millennials say, “Oh, that’s a Gen Z trait,” or the things the Gen Z says, “Oh, That’s a millennial trait.” And I don’t know if Gen X was ever that closely watched or faught with by millennials. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I also wonder how much of it is like you can’t use cringe against them as effectively because Gen X just doesn’t have as much of a digital footprint as millennials did. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We don’t have the receipts, yeah. We have like, yeah, we have like the music video of Kurt Cobain, but we don’t have the posts of all the people trying to do grunge culture on- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When they’re 15 from their bedrooms, we see it in movies, it’s less raw, there’s less of a record and so Gen X escapes scrutiny that way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once upon a time, older generations referred to millennials as the lazy, entitled generation. But it seems like every time a new generation ages into young adulthood, it’s their turn to be scrutinized. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that brings us back to the most recent skirmish in this generational war. The Gen Z stare. Let’s open a new tab. What’s up with the Gen Z stare? Okay, so let’s talk about the Gen Z stare. What is it? How would you describe it? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z stare is just… \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s not dead air. Aiden has this vacant slack expression as if he was just factory reset. He’s doing the Gen Z stare. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Blank face. You know, someone’s just looking at you just a long pause and their brain is either buffering or processing or they’re dissociating, staring off into space. The context that people saw it most often come up was like customer service type things. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I guess like the stereotypical interaction would be some millennial or Gen X is like getting a coffee. And then they say they want, you know, sugar in it or something, or like a certain type of pump. And then the barista who’s Gen Z just kind of looks at them. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it’s this like, they’re not quite housebroken in a way for like public social interactions is the Gen Z stare. You know, they aren’t able to like interface fully or they don’t recognize when it’s their turn to talk essentially. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, a lot of people have blamed like the pandemic as these like this most formative time in childhood development is, but you’re kept in isolation, you know, and your only interactions are online. But you had your own theory, which you posted about. Can you explain that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, my own theory was that if the millennial pause is you’re seeing the shift between offstage to onstage, so they’re performing too much, the Gen Z stare is like a refusal to perform. It is a total like, “Okay, I’m not going to make the small talk. I’m not going to ask the follow-up question. I’m just here and people are gonna help me because I’m in public and I’m here, I’m a customer,” or whatever it is. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve been thinking about it in terms of like, if you go to a downtown of like any major city in the U.S. and you go look at the lunch places, they’re all like slop bowl places for the most part. And you think of how much human interaction actually happens, like you could be ordering from a screen. And the idea is just you go and you get your food, you leave. And I think so many public spaces are like that, that the etiquette is essentially like being on a train or a bus. If you’re on the subway and you don’t really talk to people, like that’s not proper. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I think it’s almost like Gen Z sees all IRL public space like the subway in a way where it doesn’t make sense, you know, to have a small talk interaction, you know, this sort of asocial — COVID being the intensifier of it, you know, when really we were so distant from each other. I think it’s downstream of that. Like Gen Z just doesn’t see public space the same way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right. I mean, because so much interaction with strangers, with people who aren’t directly in your life just happens online anyway. Whereas previous generations, like, yeah, like I guess boomers and maybe like some Gen Xers were like really into small talk because they didn’t have the internet. They didn’t social media. And now it’s like, well, you’re getting all that interaction anyway, just in a different way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Exactly, yeah, like the example I said in the video was I was at a cracker barrel at this point, like a month or two ago, and I was traveling on the road to elsewhere. And at the table next to us, like a booth next to us, there’s an older couple sitting there, a man and a woman. And another old man walks by and the two old men recognize each other. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they start having this small talk conversation about, you know, one guy’s brother going into a home and then sort of they’re catching up. It occurs to me that these two old guys don’t seem to know each other very well. I’m almost imagining that it’s the kind of thing like maybe they went to high school together or something in this same small town and they’ve had a marginal relationship their entire lives, have known of each other’s existence, been in the same network, or maybe they were co-workers somewhere before they were retired. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that this conversation of the two of them talking and taking the time to stop in the cracker barrel to have this pleasantry exchange is actually how this one guy is going to find out about this other guy’s brother going to a home. You know, it’s how they’re going to find out how people they know are doing. It’s how they’re gonna find out what’s happening in the community, because their intel about their social environment is made up of these interactions that happen in these public spaces. Whether it’s Cracker Barrel, whether it’s church, whether, you know, the store. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the fact that Gen Z doesn’t have that, it sort of occurred to me that, you know, I’m not sure I would have that conversation with someone I knew marginally that I went to high school, but I haven’t really talked to since. I would probably pretend I didn’t notice them in a public space. And it’s because if I want that data, I go on Instagram and I see, okay, she’s getting married. Her fiance looks nice. Haven’t seen her in eight years. Happy for her. You know, like there’s this kind of immediacy, but also it happens through the platforms. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know you no longer need these specially made places for it. And so the Cracker Barrel just becomes a place to eat for me. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the Gen Z stare is a refusal to use public space as public space. It’s. Treating it as private space, right? You’re just there to get what you want to get to fulfill the particular function. And you’re not gonna put on the front of saying, oh, how was the weather? How are you doing? If you’re just gonna say, how do I get from point A to point B? And you gonna save your emotional labor, I guess your social presentation for the platforms where you actually have more of a chance to control it and more of chance to choose where it goes and who it’s going to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does the Gen Z stare tell us about… us? Well, instead of being expected to perform social niceties all the time, a lot of younger generations choose when and how they want to be perceived. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But maybe there is something lost in the way we socialize now. Everything online is so curated, and there is some thing about the messiness of spontaneous real-life connections that feels very human. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then again, the Gen Z stare could just be a sign that people are finding this kind of connection online instead. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s be real. Every generation has been hated on and criticized by previous generations. It’s just how things go. But things are different now. The internet and the way we’re constantly consuming and participating in content puts each generation under more of a microscope. It amplifies the tension between each group. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So we often see these arguments end with, you know, Gen Z expressing anger over the current economic and labor conditions that they’ve grown into, you know that they have aged into. But millennials, aren’t necessarily the ones to blame because they also faced very, you now, tumultuous economic and labor conditions when they aged into adulthood. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gen Z probably hates the boomers more than millennials, just as I’m sure millennials kind of know the boomers are… If you, I think if you were to do polling, that’s what people would say would be my suspicion. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I think the economic angle of it is important because if COVID for Gen Z was this moment kind of before their adult life began, where it kind of threw the whole thing in doubt. And for millennials, it was, you know, they, this sort of hard one stability or you know, first few steps on the path of life that suddenly get derailed or jostled around. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So are these markers of cultural conflicts really just a distraction from the realities of, you know, the world right now with these very precarious and unpredictable economic and social changes? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think what makes them feel a little bit more serious is the way that young people feel disempowered today as all these changes are coming down the pike. I mean, not to be like the gerontocracy guy or banging that drum constantly, but it seems like a lot of the people in charge at high levels or even at like medium levels are going to hang on and they have economic incentives to do so as well. You know, it’s getting more difficult to be a retired person. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it feels a little like Gen Z and millennials to a lesser extent are through their voices online sort of trying to assert a kind of power that is largely unavailable to them, because our whole lives I think we kind of grew up knowing this tsunami of whatever is coming, whether it’s the AI apocalypse or climate change or whatever is arriving. And it’s like, actually, no, just keep playing on the beach, the adults are going to do something about it. And now it’s sort of like Let us grab the wheel, let us grab the wheel. Come on, guys, and it’s not happening. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This whole thing really picked up when Gen Z aged into adulthood and started taking over spaces that had been ruled by millennials. They didn’t just usurp millennial territories, but started carving out new ones too, places that millennials might’ve been hesitant to explore but have eventually settled into. Take TikTok, for example. A Pew Research study last year found that TikTok’s 35 to 49 demographic is actually growing faster than its 18 to 34 users. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But a new faction is gaining power more quickly than millennials or Gen Z ever did. And everyone seems to be a little bit scared of them. They’re built different. They’ve been online since birth. They communicate in emojis before they can even read. And their memes are weirder. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Skibidi Toilet: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What the heck is goin’ on, on, you, on Brrrr Skibidibobobobo, yes, yes Skibidibobo the neem, neem \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s only a matter of time before Gen Alpha takes over the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think Gen Z is going to react worse to the rise of Gen Alpha than millennials reacted to the Gen Z. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why is that? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Cuz I think for Gen Z, the identity is a little even more tied into the internet than for millennials. I think, for GenZ, they have this sense that, oh, they’re the weirdest, they’re the most special. So I think as Gen Alpha rises and they get into niche memes that Gen Z doesn’t understand, I think that the sense that the meme cultural capital is with Gen Alpha will be much more re-stabilizing. I think Gen Alpha is also much more like, doesn’t need us, and that’s the most annoying thing. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They’re so self-sufficient. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They don’t need us at all, yeah. They’re like little aliens and they sit there on their iPads or you know watch their Roblox or their Bluey or whatever and there’s just- there’s just no engagement or like need to listen to us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you so much for joining us, Aidan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aidan Walker:\u003c/b> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you, Morgan. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Let’s c\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">lose all these tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and helps edit the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Original music, including our theme song, by Chris Egusa. Sound design by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dustsilver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron Red switches. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you have feedback, or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at CloseAllTabs@kqed.org. Follow us on instagram @CloseAllTabsPod, or drop it on Discord — we’re in the Close All Tabs channel at discord.gg/KQED. And if you’re enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple podcasts or whatever platform you use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thanks for listening! \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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},
"selected-shorts": {
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