In the summer of 2026 a professor began to suspect that most of his students were using AI to cheat.
Roberto Serrano taught economics at Brown, a prestigious private research university and member of America’s famed ‘Ivy League’.
Serrano had set a straightforward midterm earlier in the school year. A supposedly closed-book exam in which students were given 12 hours to remotely submit an exam designed to take two hours.
The students turned their papers in. Serrano scored them. The class average was a whopping 96/100.
Around forty students got perfect marks, which surprised Serrano because he knew the exam was harder than the previous midterms he’d set, which yielded average scores from 65 to 80 per cent.
There were more clues. The student’s working was convoluted. More complicated than he’d taught them, and when Serrano fed the exam to ChatGPT to confirm his suspicions, the results and mistakes were all near-identical.
Serrano didn’t confront his students; he simply announced that the final exam would be held in person.
Eighteen students dropped the class immediately. Nine more stayed on, but then did not attend the final exam. Of the remaining 59, the average score was cut almost in half – from 96 to 49. From the highest scores in his class's history to the lowest.
Almost everyone was dramatically worse.
Almost everyone.
One superstar’s score dropped from 95.5 to 95. A few other students only dropped 10 - 15 points.
And then there was one weird student. On the midterm exam they were the worst in the class by wide margin, scoring 55. On the day of the final exam, they scored 59.
A small gain of 4 points, you might say. A humble improvement. But they were the only student in the class whose score actually improved between midterms and finals.
A post I saved called him “Mister 59". The apparent loser of the midterm season turned out to be one of the only people who had actually learned anything.
What interested me in this case wasn’t so much the cheating. And the moral isn’t of the Aesop variety, where the middling student ends up at the top. Indeed, their final score was still middling.
But consider the psyche of that student. While others cheated around him, perhaps imperceptibly, he must have looked like a loser. He was the worst. Bottom of the class. It was only when the crutches of his peers were removed that he would realise he was in the top third of the class (albeit at the bottom of that cohort).
He was punished twice in the process: first by receiving lower scores than the cheats, and then by having his honest work judged against work they hadn’t done.
This is the position bad writers now find themselves in.
There’s nothing new about people who take credit for other people’s work. I think the distinction is that skipping the process of creating the work often robs you of the understanding of what it takes to produce that work.
Now that writing output can be generated, you might think, why would I ever bother? Surely, the floor of my output is now higher than it was previously. A person who can’t write a good paragraph can now produce twenty of them in a flash. A student who doesn’t understand their class's material can still produce a polished explanation of it.
You never need to face an empty page again. You never need to know what to say, or how to say it.
Bad writing is optional now. And I’ll take my hat off to anyone brave enough to exhibit it. Anyone brave enough to sharpen their sword in public, and by risking the ruin of writing imperfectly, slowly perfect their ability.
The man beside the arena
Theodore Roosevelt gave one of my favourite speeches in 1910. The 26th President of the United States of America addressed a crowd at Sorbonne University in Paris and delivered the speech ‘Citizenship in a Republic’, more commonly referred to as “The Man in the Arena.”
First, I must urge you to read it for yourself. I find that much like songs which become popular on TikTok, highly mimetic speeches often have far better passages than simply the parts that they’re most known for.
Here is the commonly quoted passage:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It is easy to see where others have stumbled. It’s easy to snicker and chastise, to imagine how we might have done better.
Spectators rarely imagine themselves less capable. You’ll know this if you’ve watched a film or even a sports game and found yourself muttering, "Why didn’t he just… [x]?" while watching someone perform feats at the edge of human capability.
Far more men think they could beat Serena Williams at tennis than the number of men you could trust to reliably return a serve.
The spectator honestly believes himself to be good – or at least that he could be good under the right circumstances.
He could write great books if he had the time, start companies if he had the money, and direct groundbreaking cinema if the industry wasn’t so obsessed with Christopher Nolan and superhero movies. He could win any argument if anyone serious were willing to debate him.
To confuse matters, the spectator is often right in his criticisms. The books he reads may indeed be clichéd and terrible. The companies he sees may be wasteful. The films may be plodding. pious, or pretentious.
But the ultimate problem is that the spectator is not in the arena! He has no idea what it takes. His muscles are fresh because he has not wrestled. His brain is restless because it is not taxed. The spectator, in his mind, has all the properties of a superhero – he is always sharp, always strong, always ready and conscious to take perfect action.
And most importantly, spectators rarely have scars – or only enough to have scared them to the sidelines.
Most people prefer the flattering uncertainty of having never failed – of having never risked and been defeated.
The great mistake spectators make is to imagine themselves somewhere between the beginner and the accomplished: not excellent yet, but obviously capable. In reality, they are not on that scale. The scale begins when they make something.
Bad work is not the lowest point inside the arena. It is the first point inside it.
If you have not experienced being bad, and you have not proved yourself to be good, you may have fallen for the saddest fate of all. To be nothing.
The fake arena
Roosevelt’s distinction between doers and critics is incomplete. It lets another class of person off the hook. There is someone who looks like a doer but in truth has not entered the contest.
The charlatan is in the arena in the same sense that WWE is UFC.
Sure, there is still a ring. There are lights. There are opponents. There is audience. There is sweat. There may even be injury.
But the goal of the charlatan isn’t success; it is spectacle. From a distance, they may seem inseparable. But the relationship between the performance and the result is different.
Charlatans do a lot of work, but much of it is fake. They put more effort into the show of competence than into the skills themselves.
And to be a charlatan says nothing about your actual ability.
Elon Musk, for example, in some areas of his life has been a proven charlatan. He has boasted of being a high-ranking Diablo player and posted screenshots to show his extraordinarily high level.
But when he tried to show his live gameplay, keen gamers were confused to see he didn’t play like someone with a strong grasp of the game. It later emerged that he was simply paying young Asian kids to ‘grind’ through the game to level up his character.
Elon has all the external marks of a master. But when called upon to prove his skill, he barely knows what button to press. This says little about his true capability, were he ever to apply himself earnestly. But for now, he bears the mark of a charlatan.
The man (or woman) in the arena performs verbs until they earn nouns. The charlatan in the eaves performs nouns until the verbs are assumed.
The writer writes to tell better stories. The charlatan writes to preserve their position as a writer.
The academic researches to learn and discover. The charlatan publishes to get cited and gain tenure.
The founder uses invested funds to build the company described in the pitch. The charlatan uses each investment to buy more time before anyone can discover that the company they pitched does not truly exist.
The charlatan only generates enough verbs to stop anyone taking their nouns away.
Here’s the thing though – the charlatan is still above the spectator.
The charlatan at least wanted something badly enough to act, even if their action was kabuki theatre. The charlatan’s crooked position can always be straightened. The spectator, however, has nothing but the fantasies of his mind.
The spectator has protected their potential so thoroughly that there is nothing available to improve. Their workshop isn’t full of counterfeit works. It is empty and worth nothing. Before they can become good, they must first consent to being bad.
At least the sinner can be redeemed.
Forbes, Fortune, and fake pipelines of success
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list is extremely efficient in producing three outcomes:
Nouns – founders, millionaires, visionaries, etc.
Fame – the natural adulation that accrues to those with strong nouns
Criminals – the boatload of chancers who seek only fame and spectacle
Famous examples abound: Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Charlie Javice, Martin Shkreli, Nate Paul and others. Forbes eventually created its own “Hall of Shame” for former honourees, though that list is doubtless incomplete.
Charlie Javice’s company, Frank, as one example, claimed to help millions of students get financial aid. JPMorgan acquired them for a cool $175 million. It only took a matter of months to learn that the company had around 300,000 users rather than the 4.25 million it claimed. Javice got one of her data scientists to create millions of fake customer records, and that’s what they sold to J.P. Morgan.
People don’t always start with bad intentions. And like I’ve said, being a charlatan is not a complete descriptor.
The likely story is she had some early traction. She got the Forbes 30u30 designation and a few banner investments. All these signals soon let her raise more. But her signalling capacity soon exceeded her company-building skill, and she needed to fabricate some material to fill the gap. One thing then compounds upon another, and suddenly you’re in jail, or at least being sued for fraud.
Faking it to make it
Adam Litwin is a good example of a reformed charlatan. He spent months in a white coat at UCLA, acting like a surgical resident despite not even attending medical school. He wrote prescriptions, accessed staff areas, and watched operations. Of course this was reckless and dangerous. He was sent to jail.
Coming out of jail, though, he enrolled in medical school, passed the board examinations and actually became a doctor. And the months he spent earlier merely pretending at least formed some useful experience of where to be and what to do.
His problem was trying to claim the noun ‘doctor’ without actually understanding or attempting what it takes to become one. But as soon as he started doing the things he had previously tried to skip, he progressed much faster than he might have otherwise. That’s because charlatans are usually actually reasonably skilled, as a result of some natural ability and the experience they gain while showboating.
Charlatans do learn somewhat while being in the arena. But the longer they avoid doing the work and building real skill, the quicker everything falls apart. This is why black-hat hackers often get hired to use their skills for good.
And again, it’s why fake work, despite being its own flavour of despicable and still being outside the arena, somehow sits above no work. Someone may have begun dishonestly or in some unearned position, but they have begun. They can redirect the ambition, knowledge and energy they were using to keep the pretence alive into productive output.
The spectator still has to create something from nothing.
Undeserved head starts
Someone who finds themselves receiving more credit than they deserve has not necessarily committed fraud.
Easy examples are the beautiful, the charming, and the intelligent. Each of those things buys you grace and the benefit of the doubt. Being tall, being wealthy, being funny – all these, in some way, can create a small edge. Some people know the right people. Some get elevated in a rising tide where nothing seems to go wrong. Some get promoted by managers who see more promise than proof. Some just get lucky.
These are, in my encapsulation, all technical charlatans. They hold unearned positions. They reap where they have not sown. They enjoy fruits they have not earned.
But what matters more than that temporary buoyancy is what they do with the time they’ve been bought.
Beautiful women can enter enterprise sales and immediately get more attention than less charismatic colleagues. And it could be easy to coast on this edge. From the outside it may be hard to tell if they are working at their craft or simply enjoying a supposed grift. But time typically tells the truth in the end.
Some people rely on their original advantages and forget to build real skills. Others become beasts. It’s easy enough to laugh at women in real estate making millions by looking like eye candy. In doing so you often take for granted that they have long since passed the point of coasting on natural advantage. They are killer operators and they’ll eat you for lunch.
Natural ability can be real ability. You just can’t rest on precariousness.
I lived through this at school.
I was bright enough to get good marks without learning how to study. I spent lessons drawing caricatures and making jokes. The results told teachers that I was doing well, and because I was doing well, there was no real need to change course.
But my results told an incomplete story.
I knew enough to pass exams, but I never learned to study. I hadn’t developed any real ability to sit with subjects I found genuinely difficult, nor to organise my time or work through things I did not immediately understand.
At 17 this caught up with me. I had to stop attending most classes for a term, pick my own elective modules, and use the extra time to teach myself all the material I had skipped the previous year.
Technically I hadn’t cheated anyone. I got the grades by using my brain. But I’d cheated myself out of developing the associated skills.
An early advantage is useful partly because it buys you time to correct these deficiencies. It becomes dangerous, however, when that advantage prevents you from noticing the things you need to correct.
So, where you have a choice, aim to be good.
If you have no choice, accept being bad.
Fake work is worse than bad work, though not completely hopeless. If you find yourself benefitting from natural advantage, unearned grace, or prematurely endowed status, make the most of the time you have, and use it to build real skill – become who they think you are, rather than thinking you can pretend forever.
If you are none of these things, you are still on the sidelines. Take heart in knowing that it’s never too late to start, and being bad is the baseline for being real.
Earn your place in the arena.
The spectator is not in the arena! He has no idea what it takes. His muscles are fresh because he has not wrestled. His brain is restless because it is not taxed. The spectator, in his mind, has all the properties of a superhero – he is always sharp, always strong, always ready and conscious to take perfect action.
