From Palladium Magazine, June 30:
As if summoned from every woman’s worst nightmare, here comes an ad for a company that helps men cheat on dates by lying about everything from their interests to their age. The fictional dating profile claims to be 6’4” and work at “Bananazon.” “Maybe you are just way older than you look,” the older woman tells her much younger companion. As his ID card is rejected and he’s served grape juice, the man is discreetly prompted by his AI assistant to recover the date, complimenting her art. Launched on 4/20, the ad copy reads: “Cluely is out. cheat on everything.”
Roy Lee observed job interviews had already been made outdated by technology, becoming a kind of drudgery that was no longer meaningful for screening human talent. Then-Columbia student Lee started the company as a way to cheat on technical interviews for big tech firms. After their product, an AI “cheating tool” called Interview Coder, secured the team internship offers from Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and Capital One, Columbia University suspended Lee for live-tweeting his disciplinary process in late March.
Since then, Lee has raised a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Though Cluely no longer brazenly uses the word “cheat” on most of its copy, Cluely tells its users that the AI will do the heavy lifting for them. The product now advertises itself as an “undetectable AI” that responds to users’ screen and audio. “It’s inevitable that college students and young people will use the tools at their disposal,” Lee told me. The Cluely manifesto, subtitled “We want to cheat on everything,” spells out how cheating becomes the new normal:
And yes, the world will call it cheating. But so was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it’s normal.
Outrage is proof of concept. If software can ace a technical interview, write a stellar essay, or anchor sales deals better than a human, maybe we ought to just let the AI do it. This is just the creative destruction of capitalism: a feature, not a bug. Lee is further only hiring engineers and influencers with at least 100,000 followers to boost virality. Technology brings about change. The incentives of social media have profoundly changed the incentives of new companies, with virality becoming a close correlate of user growth. Software startups have now ended up in a new variant of a very old business—the entertainment business. Calling Cluely cheating, as Roy told me, is just a way to grab attention. This relentless chase of online virality has already bought the company free publicity in the form of countless news articles and over a million dollars in revenue.
Cluely’s casual observers and critics alike both give the start-up a boost—all comments and casual watches feed into the algorithm. In a world where the passivity of billions of viewers rewards marketing stunts, it almost doesn’t matter what the product even is.
The Competition to Nowhere
The appearance and language of this economic mood and the executive decisions it leads to can be startling. To some this economic nihilism can even be offensive. The previous mode of relating to economic activity couldn’t be more different: the old way was one of hard work, in one career, loyal to one firm, maybe two. Your Boomer parents probably spent most of their career like that. Mine did. But today, the average graduate from America’s top universities plans to work at their first job—prestigious firms such as McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, or Meta, when they were still hiring—for not more than two years....
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