“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
As we confront the opportunities and challenges of generative AI—which prompt a rethinking of the limits of originality, authorship, education, and intelligence generally—I’m reminded of this quote. Is generative AI a productivity-boosting “easy button” if harnessed properly? Or will it lead us to the worst parts of laziness, such as plagiarism and copying without critical thought?
Ironically, this quote is often misattributed to Bill Gates (who may have mentioned it at a conference), but was originally coined by Frank Galbreth, an early 20th century efficiency expert. If Gates did say it and didn’t immediately cite Galbreth, does that make him a plagiarist, or just aligned with the idea? Does a plagiarism charge matter less if Gates believes it to be true and puts it into practice?
I pondered this quote last June when visiting a friend’s son just before his college graduation. With AI and ChatGPT at the forefront of my mind, I asked the graduating class whether they were hip to ChatGPT. The response, of course, was knowing laughter. Based on my very informal survey and control group, I now suspect that 97 percent of the ~19 million college students in the US are a very active part of the 100 million ChatGPT users globally. A few students knew about Bard, but I didn’t find one student who was familiar with Anthropic’s Claude model (though they were excited to hear of another option). I was quickly reminded that graduating seniors in college may be the most efficient (laziest) of them all, as they’re focused on doing the minimum necessary to get the degree and graduate on time. Recruiters, take note—we have a new crop of easy button finders!
After college I taught high school history for one year at my alma mater after college. Catching student plagiarism was easier back then—one could identify a sentence from an essay that simply didn’t seem like it could have been formulated by a freshman in high school, run it through Google or some other homework-sleuthing search engine, and typically one’s suspicions were correct (with the occasional surprise).
