Confronting the Honesty Crisis

ChatGPT was released to the public in 2022. Within one year of this release, disturbing survey findings were already emerging. One found that three-fourths of students who had learned how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to help with assignments indicated that even if their professor banned the use of AI, they would continue to use it. Similarly, in early 2024, The Guardian cited a British survey, which found that over half of British undergraduates admitted to employing AI for graded schoolwork.

Students, of course, cheated long before generative AI. But thanks to these tools, cheating is far easier to get away with than in the past. Using one of these systems can save students hours of work while still producing a paper or block of code likely to receive a good grade. As such, it is clear that we are confronting an honesty crisis in education today.

An “honesty crisis” is a label I developed to refer to a disturbing scenario: when we see a sudden increase in dishonest behavior caused by at least two factors. For whatever reason, dishonest actions have become harder to detect, so people deem them easier to get away with than previously. At the same time, dishonest behavior has become more tempting than it was in the past. When we find ourselves in the midst of such a crisis, dishonesty accelerates around us.

In my new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, I explore other areas in addition to education that are facing an honesty crisis. These include deepfakes, pornography and infidelity websites like Ashley Madison, fake news, celebrity culture, and dishonesty among religious leaders, including the plagiarism of sermons.