Chegg: “spiraling with no stability in sight”
Plus, AI bots are cheating at video games. Plus, Quillbot has an AI detector?
Issue 292
Subscribe below to join 3,846 other smart people who get “The Cheat Sheet.” New Issues every Tuesday and Thursday.
If you enjoy “The Cheat Sheet,” please consider joining the 18 amazing people who are chipping in a few bucks via Patreon. Or joining the 38 outstanding citizens who are now paid subscribers. Paid subscriptions start at $8 a month. Thank you!
Chegg is “spiraling with no stability in sight.”
In the last Issue of The Cheat Sheet, we reported on Chegg’s continued losses, its seemingly bottomless stock drop, and its new CEO.
That was Tuesday. By Wednesday, the financial press noticed, and a flood of stories arrived about stock downgrades and doom analysis. I’m here for it.
This particular story from Yahoo! is worth sharing. It’s pretty typical of the bunch but also includes:
Following this [recent earnings] report, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill downgraded the stock to Underperform from Hold, slashing his price target to $4 from $7. He noted that Chegg is "spiraling with no stability in sight."
"We question if Chegg can build an AI experience that is meaningfully better than free alternatives that students will be willing to pay for," Thill wrote.
Four bucks. Spiraling. Yikes.
By Thursday afternoon, Chegg stock was clinging to just above $5 a share, down from a high of $113.
Between free AI stealing Chegg’s proverbial lunch money and the mounting legal crises, plural (see Issue 280 and Issue 55), the company’s future looks pretty bleak.
I’m here for that too.
AI Bots are Cheating at Video Games
I only share this story about AI bots infiltrating and cheating at video games because it illustrates the point that cheating is not necessarily about stress and exam pressure.
The idea that otherwise “good” students are driven to misconduct by unreasonable success stress, is, as I wrote in Issue 287, not supported by evidence. When cheating shows up in online video games — where there is no success pressure and no real reward for winning — it should be obvious that some cheating is driven by simple opportunity.
QuillBot has an AI Detector?
It seems that QuillBot — the paraphrasing engine that students use to smudge the fingerprints of academic misconduct — has its own AI detector.
No, really.
QuillBot, the company owned by cheating conglomerate Course Hero (now Learneo), has an AI detector.
Now, you may ask yourself, “Why would a paraphrase engine that’s commonly used to confuse and bypass AI detectors, have an AI detector?”
That’s a great question.
Or, rephrased, “Why would a student want to know how much AI was in their writing?”
Either way, the answer is the same. The only reason a student, or anyone supposedly creating content, would want to know the percentage of AI material in their document is because they have AI material in their document.
Obvious, right?
By adding a free AI detector to their growing arsenal of cheating tools, Learneo/Course Hero/Quillbot now makes it easy to use AI to create any written work or class assignment, use their services to check it for AI detection, then use their service to paraphrase it until it can no longer be detected.
How convenient.
I mean, what would you think of a company that sold fake passports and offered a way to check an official passport registry used by authorities to verify them? It’s possible, you may say, that someone would want to check their existing passport — just to be sure it’s ok.
But it’s far more likely that that the reason that the people in the fake passport business allow people to check the authenticity of passports, is so that they can make it easier to get away with buying a fake one. Duh. It’s literally the same reason that essay mills provide plagiarism reports from Turnitin, to assure their customers that they won’t get caught.
In other words, Learneo is now not just in the cheating business. They’re now also in the be-sure-you-get-away-with-it business.
It’s cynical. And offensive to anyone who cares whether people actually learn. Or cares whether degrees and credentials mean anything.
But it is profitable. And to some people, the cash is all that matters.