A couple of years ago, a grocery delivery company came up with a catchy slogan. Their service, they said, was about the “democratisation of laziness.”
It is a memorable phrase, and also slightly unsettling. It’s true that it is easier to be lazy if you are wealthy and privileged, but it’s also true that we don’t think of laziness as an absolute good to be maximised. Rather than giving everyone the chance to be lazy, maybe we should think about finding ways to make everyone less lazy?
Of course, laziness has its upsides as well as downsides, so maybe democratising it is not so bad. I’ve written about this dilemma in a piece on the stupidogenic society.
But there are some things that are more unambiguously bad where we should definitely try to remove elite privileges rather than spread those privileges to everyone. Cheating is one of them. Wealthy students have always been able to pay top dollar to have bespoke essays written for them. But until recently, this kind of unidentifiable cheating was only available to the very wealthy. Large Language Models have changed all that. They have democratised cheating, and made it available for the masses.
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