philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Man Who Wants AI to Help You ‘Cheat on Everything’

Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to “cheat” on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly “cheat on everything.”  ...

Lee wants people to use Cluely on “Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations,” the “manifesto” on the software’s website says. “If there’s a faster way to win—we’ll take it. We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess—you’re already right.” ...

“The second realm of negative feedback is that ‘cheating is inherently unethical and immoral.’ This is where we’re trying to do a lot of reframing around what exactly defines cheating, what cheating really is, and what cheating will look like in a future that is AI native,” he said. ...

I tried out a test version of Cluely in a mock interview with Emanuel Maiberg. We pretended Emanuel was interviewing me for a position at 404 Media and I used Cluely to shape my answers. ...

Then Cluely would answer the question it had just heard Emanuel ask me and put its answers in an overlay at the top of my screen. It would come in two pieces: a bright white script I could read verbatim and a darker piece of text below that explained the AI’s reasoning. Because of the way Cluely is programmed, it doesn’t show up in recordings or even screenshots. ...

It also wasn’t that impressive. A few questions into the conversation and Emanuel and I realized it was just feeding me ChatGPT answers to the questions as if I’d typed them in a browser. It also took 20 seconds each time to generate, with Emanuel and I staring at each other while we waited. ...

“The only thing the product really showcased [in the commercial] was ChatGPT in your glasses,” Lee said. ...

Both Lee and the marketing copy for Cluely hammer home that technical innovations are often thought of as cheating. Math teachers worried about the advent of calculators. ...

Every single thing that is rote memorization, that relies on facts that you don’t need in the moment, that are not intrinsically necessary for a human to learn, you won’t need that anymore.”

“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. Everybody sits in a room eight hours a day, takes multiple choice exams. In my future, everything we understand education to be, will be completely gone.” He said that people will explore whatever topics they want from the earliest ages in the “most efficient way possible.” ...

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