From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
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Michelle Kassorla shared a great (or alarming, I shoudl say) rundown of the Einstein tool.
Basically this tool was using an open source tool called Open Claw which has terrible terrible privacy concerns, by the way. Then, when you open your course in Canvas, it could literally watch lecture videos, read essays, write papers and complete quizzes.
What is Open Claw?
Basically Open Claw is embedded in your computer and has access to everything. It was formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot and has gone viral but security experts have warned people not to join the trend.
Back to Einstein
OK, back to Einstein, so, using OpenClaw it installs and goes onto your machine.
If you look at the original promotional content (cited below from The Cheat Sheet substack), you can be alarmed. They did rebrand it as the tutor you deserve. However, it seems the makers of Einstein thought people deserved to hang out by the pool and let their AI pretend for them to be educated.
So, recently OpenClaw has been banned by many of the AI tools likely because of excessive consumption of tokens.
But Einstein lasted five days. ”The Cheat Sheet” Substack has a great overview of what happened with Einstein.
What Should We Think?
Sadly, this is going to be coming to everything everywhere. What can be done about it?
Well, I know in K12, we’ve moved to oral book reports, oral conversations, and talking to students. This is a good move, in my book. We should have always been talking to students. And while I teach Computer Science, lids of laptops are as much down as up in my class.
Of course if you go oral conversations online, eventually you’ll have AI deep fake, which *gasp* can I say it, might suddenly increase the value of face-to-face education yet again for those colleges and high schools willing to reduce class size, improve on human interaction, and make it so that the teaching experience is *double gasp* personal again.
To move forward, we must have vision. We cannot look back at what was but what will be. And what will be is that our students in college must know how to master and use AI (like using Claude Cowork as I talked about in this week’s newsletter) as appropriate but also must have knowledge in their topic so that they are qualified to supervise the AI tools.
Learning: The Old and the New
Learning is important. So is integrity. I always told my children I’d rather have an honest C than a cheating A. Now, this generation might just have better educated students down below the top crust who are so competitive for grades that they might be willing to use AI to help them get it.
But is that a bad thing if they know the content?
Right now my students are creating presentations. Some of them fight with making presentations and don’t like making them. They’ve written the outlines. They’ve done the research (using Google Notebook LM, for example but citing original documents) and have even had an oral conversation with me about their topics. But is making slides really vital to this? No!
I have taught them how to use AI to make the first draft of their slides and to edit it from there. They actually have to know more about their slide program to edit these slides because AI is notoriously bad about just adding text boxes, but that is neither here nor there.
Time to Talk
We need to be having some real, human conversations that don’t involve people getting red faced and spitting across the room in fury that education has come to this.
We need to stop blatantly accusing everybody and their brother of using AI when there is, in fact, good uses of AI for just about every task under the sun. I guess I always ask -what is the role of the human and does their thinking shine through.
As for this post, I’ve written the whole thing — em dashes and all. 🙂
I’m not eager to meet Einstein — we’ll if he was alive maybe I would be. But this cheating ai bot is not something I’m happy about even though it rests in the 404 graveyard. A former pastor of mine, Stephen Dervan, used to say, “A half-truth is a whole lie.”
I see a lot of educators justifying what AI can do to help them grade when in reality they are giving over their gradebook to a bot. I see a lot of students justifying what AI can do to help them live their lives and get sleep and stress less when in reality they are giving over their future to a bot.
As people who have pretended that social media was actually social and helped us be less lonely — how has that turned out for us.
Are we now going to pretend that AI in everything is actually going to make us more intelligent?
AI is a tool and there are times for its use. But to put AI everywhere in education is yet another way to feed the machine and not improve humankind.
As someone who likes using tech wisely but values humans, we need to wake up and smell the burn of another lie scorching our society before we go down another path and blindly trust in a future given over to the greed.
Our babies are more important than to be entrusted to an AI-nanny that has no other objective than to stay in business. It is time to open our eyes, be wise, and use our brains about the uses of AI that improve human flourishing and those that diminish it.
There’s no going back but there is a way forward. I’d like to be part of the solution with all of you.
Let’s talk.
We sure do need it.
In the meantime, RIP Einstein Cheating bot — I’m sure we’ll be seeing one of your offspring soon.
The post Einstein Cheating Bot Exposed: What You Should Know appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!
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