HONESTLY? THIS FEELS DISHONEST

Have you heard about Cluely, the AI tool people are using to cheat on job interviews and Zoom calls? Give the app access to your screen and your audio, and it’ll feed you answers in real time. One founder filmed himself using it to win an internship — and lost the role when he posted the video. That’s just one example of the company’s marketing blitz, which is part “disruption,” part performance art, and all in on the idea that etiquette and ethics are just cultural bugs waiting to be patched.

So Cluely is as much an ethos as it is an app. The company’s manifesto leads with, “We want to cheat on everything,” then pivots to semantic gymnastics — because calculators were once cheating too, right? Well, maybe. The better question is what counts as cheating in an age of ubiquitous AI. Cluely differentiates itself by saying the quiet part out loud. From coders submitting AI-generated work, to students using ChatGPT to “write” their essays and professors using ChatGPT to “grade” those essays, the line between using tools and outright dishonesty is blurring fast.

For more on that, ~~check Perplexity~~ read on below.

BY THE DIGITS

$15 million: Reported VC funding Cluely raised from Andreessen Horowitz.

Over 50%: Percentage of students using ChatGPT to help with assignments. Seems low.

68%: Percentage of professors using AI tools to catch AI-based cheating. Seems low, too.

$120 million: Cluely’s reported valuation as of the last funding round.

Infinite: Number of gray areas AI has created across the academic, professional, and personal arenas, not forgetting the baseline ethics of AI itself.

BLURRED LINES

AI didn’t invent cheating. People did. Fittingly, people also built AI on stolen materials. Just ask any artist who’s ever painted a painting or written a book how “fair” the so-called “fair use” defense sounds — especially now that trillion-dollar companies like Meta are using it to justify training their models on pirated creative work. Should we be surprised that moral slipperiness has trickled outward? Viewed this way, it’s little wonder AI-based cheating is happening on a mass scale. That’s arguably how we got here to begin with.

The line between cheating and more serious crimes looks to be blurring, too. AI is being used to power scams that bilk victims out of millions. Just last year, a man was arrested in what prosecutors called the first AI-driven music fraud case, allegedly using bot networks to stream AI-generated tracks on repeat — to the tune of $10 million in royalties. The album had a billion streams and zero fans.

Lawmakers are scrambling to catch up, but as usual, enforcement lags grift. In a world where almost anyone can access AI tools, deceit has been democratized. You don’t have to be a genius hacker anymore – just a guy with a plug-in and a willingness to blur the rules.

After all, if the AI wrote it, did you even cheat?

QUOTABLE

“Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it's normal.”

—The Cluely manifesto, redefining the boundaries of truth one marketing stunt at a time.

POP QUIZ

What genre of music was at the center of the first AI-driven music fraud case?

A. Contemporary jazz

B. Hip hop

C. Techno

D. Rock

Check out the answer at the bottom of this email.

BRIEF HISTORY

1998: Turnitin launches. It will soon become an ubiquitous tool for professors looking to catch digital-age cheaters.

2015: Grammarly hits mainstream adoption, sparking debate about “acceptable assistance.”

2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT. Students, coders, and corporate employees begin quietly outsourcing tasks.

2023: First articles go viral about students using AI to cheat. Moral panic begins.

2025: Cluely goes viral by advertising for interns, teasing $50-an-hour pay in exchange for (at least) four “look how I cheated” TikTok videos a day.

FUN FACT!

Cluely even advertises itself as a kind of dating app. The pitch, in a nutshell: impress girls with your AI-generated “knowledge” of art.

WATCH THIS

Get a sense of Cluely controversy via TikTok. It’s less about a single video than the whole damn vibe.