HealthyGamerGG - We Need To Talk About The AI Cheating Epidemic

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K tackles the growing epidemic of AI cheating in schools and universities. He explores the provocative idea that while cheating is ethically wrong, it is often a highly efficient path to success in a world that rewards results over the actual labor of learning. What to expect in this episode: The "Self-Scam" Perspective: An orthopedic surgeon explains why cheaters aren't "beating the system"—they are just walking into the workforce with a "fake map" and no ability to handle real-world pressure. The Efficiency Mindset: Why the same tactics we call "optimization" in the corporate world are labeled "cheating" in school, and why students prioritize efficiency over ethics. The "Stupid" Sociopath: Dr. K reveals why our research on cheaters and sociopaths is flawed, as we only ever study the people who were caught rather than the "smart" ones who fly under the radar. The Success of Corruption: A look at how cheating can be a "one-way ticket" to elite institutions and why the most successful cheaters are those who keep their greed and ego in check. Right vs. Effective: A deep dive into why doing what is "right" and doing what "works" are often on two completely different axes, and why true long-term success requires mastery rather than shortcuts. Does this roadmap capture the balance between the "efficient" reality of cheating and the "self-scam" of losing deep knowledge, or should we focus more on the medical school cheating scandals mentioned in the sources?HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist gamer and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. One of the things that's going on right now, I don't know if you'll know this, but like, cheating with AI is rampant in universities, in high schools,

people are just using AI. They're all these AI detectors. Sometimes an AI detector falsely detect something. So like teachers and professors are just getting demolished because it's something like 40% of their class uses AI. And then they go to the administration and they're like, what are we supposed to do? And the administration is like, I don't know, they're an international student that's paying us $45,000 a year to be here. So don't expel them because we need their money. So administrations are not doing a great job.

at managing AI related things, professors are on the front line of like people are cheating, right? And they're like, we're not sure what to do. And so I thought this was super cool because this professor is like, I'm going to go to a cheating subreddit and I'm going to ask y'all,

instructor here, why? Why are you guys? I'm just wondering why you guys do this? It seems like y'all are bright and have clearly spent a lot of time thinking through the cheating process. Why not just do your fucking assignments? I'm not here to say, F you.

My message is this. We went through grad school and were professionalized to write and do our own work. We take our jobs seriously. Many of us see cheating not only is an academic dishonesty, but a personal affront. Why are you all doing this? I love this response because this is sort of what I said. I've been an orthopedic surgeon for almost 20 years and someone was talking about this. I thought I would chime in.

It's pretty wild that people think they are beating the system when they're just scamming themselves out of the one thing they're actually paying for, which is the ability to handle pressure and master a subject. One student mentioned that they are too afraid to fail, but the reality is that by cheating, you have already failed the most important test, which is building the discipline to show up and do the work. When things get hard, if you get a degree without actually learning the material, you're basically walking into the workforce slash world with a fake map and no compass. And I was like, damn, that guy is right.

You guys may have heard me tell the story, right? And I'm not surprised that this person is an orthopedic surgeon, is a physician, because most physicians reach a point in their course. career where they realize it's not about getting the grade. It's actually about saving lives. Right. So I was on, when I was a medical student, I was on a boat in Belize. And there was a guy there who started vomiting. And I was just a medical student, but I was like, oh, crap, like this guy is vomiting? Like, is he dying? Like, does he have appendicitis? Does he have a ruptured appendix? Did he drink too much? Does he have heat stroke? Like, what's going on? Is this like a medical

emergency or not a medical emergency? Right. So at some point, like, you have to learn the material. And I'm a huge advocate of like learning things. So in a day and age where AI is like, you know, AI can give you the sort of like shallow to medium level expertise in anything. But AI does not give you deep knowledge in anything. It can't do that. I've tried. I've tested. Right.

If you can, I've asked different kinds of AI's a hundred different questions. Not literally 100, but like 16, 15 different questions about different kinds of meditation. It gives the same answer over and over and over again. So AI is kind of like Google version 2.0 where Google made a lot of information accessible. AI gives a lot of makes more information accessible. So the question is why do people do this? And this is where I'm a psychiatrist. I'm not an orthopedic surgeon.

So I'm a big fan of deep learning. I showed you all a paper today about Chinese, elderly Chinese people who have a victim hero complex. Chat Chupit, I don't know if it's going to know that. So why do people do this? We live in a world where if you steal a car that's worth $30,000 you go to jail you steal $100,000, you embezzle

$200,000 you also go to jail. You steal $100 million, you get a fine. You steal a billion dollars, you get a bailout. This is the world, we live it. Like, I'm not even, like, I know this is going to be really hard

for people do because they're going to clip it out of context. they're like, but I want you all to think about this historically. Think about it like an alien from outer space. If you observe the world that we live in today, and there's a good argument to be made for actually learning shit. I love it. I just made it. But let's not delude ourselves into like forgetting that cheating is probably one of the best ways to rise to financial prominence and success in the world. I know a ton of people. And if you guys are in academia, you know what I'm talking about. In academia, there's a bunch of people who have engines with postdocs, with PhD students, who are grinding with the credit flowing to the top. There's great labs. I've been, you know,

trained at Harvard, amazing labs there where PIs, I had an amazing P.I. One day I'll tell you guys this story. It's something I've scripted out about how I became who I am. And I had an amazing P.I. at Harvard who's just awesome. So there's like great people in academia, but there's also a lot of frauds in academia. There's a lot of people who take credit for other people's work. There's a lot of people in group projects

who don't actually do anything and get a grade anyway. There's a lot of people who fail upward at companies. There's a lot of people who show up are charismatic, answer questions, but don't do a whole lot of work. There's a lot of people who,

when you send them a draft of the deck that y'all are putting, they're the ones who email it to the partner and make it seem as if it is their own work. These people get paid. I literally had a patient of mine once tell me that their boss was like, you're going to make me a lot of money one, like you're going to make me a lot of money over the next five years. Literally what the boss told him. To his face. And you wonder, why do students cheat? They cheat because it works. They cheat because it's efficient. But what if you get caught? Hey, all, if you're interested in applying

some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. K's guide to mental health. And if you kind of tunnel down, okay, why aren't you motivated? And they're like, well, there's no point. And if you get underneath, there's no point, what you ultimately find is hopelessness. So what the yogis discovered is that what we call motivation, they actually called a concentrated mind. What's the difference between someone who actually does stuff and someone who just tries to do stuff?

So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. So let's talk about sociopathy for a second. This is something that people do not understand. When we look at sociopathy, our research on sociopathy comes from prisons. Now, why does our research on sociopathy come from prisons? Because prisons are the only place that you have a population of sociopaths. Right. If I'm recruiting for a study to study something of,

sociopathy, where can I go and find 2,000 sociopaths? Because in scientific research, we want large sample sizes, right? We look at populations. We're not doing anecdote. Antiquet isn't science. I need a large number. So what we do is we research sociopathy, and we come up with a lot of findings on sociopathy. But there's a selection bias. Our research on sociopathy is on stupid sociopaths, not regular sociopaths. Not intelligent sociopaths. The people who get punished for cheating, right? So when we study cheating, how do we study cheating?

How do we know someone is cheating? Because they got caught. We're not looking at everybody else. So my favorite example of this, this is going to be such a random-ass example that if you're in the medical community, you may have heard about this, but if you're not, you're going to have no idea. So there's this exam called the USMLE Step 1 and step 2. The exam is rigorous, okay?

So when you graduate from medical school, you take these two exams over the course of graduation. Your scores on these exams largely determine whether you do what kind of doctor you become and where you do residency. Okay, so this is like basically like, I want to go to Harvard, I want to do dermatology, I want to do psychiatry, I want to become an orthopedic surgeon. Or are you going to become a family medicine doc? There's competitive specialties, non-competitive specialties. Some doctors make a million dollars a year. Some doctors make $150,000 a year. Some doctors work 80 hours a week. Some doctors work 32 hours a week, 28 hours a week. The other crazy thing is that some doctors work 34 hours a week and make 800,000. Some doctors work 65 and make $150,000. So this exam determines how you spend your days, how much bullshit you put up with, and how much money you make. And there was a lot of you make. And there was a lot of you

was a group of people, I think in Nepal, a test center started conspiring with people to let them cheat on the exam. And so these people were getting like a good score is like maybe 230, 235, something like that, okay, just to give you all a sense. And so like some, you know, guy out of Nepal comes out of this with like a 270. And there are a lot of people who go to medical school in other parts of the world who want to come to the United States because in the United States you make money. Doctors make a lot of money here. We don't have socialized medicine like the UK. or Canada, where doctors also make a decent living there, but they don't make bank the way that they do here in the U.S. So the brightest doctors, like one of my roommates when I was in Boston, you know, was a guy from, I think, Austria, and his step scores were ridiculous. And he was at Harvard. And he's like one of them, like, so most of the prestigious residencies, we take mostly people who are from the U.S., but we take the best and the brightest from the rest of the world. And so these guys basically conspired to cheat on a test. He gets like a 270, 280, 280. damn near a perfect score. So some Nepalese kid gets a perfect score on this test. It's a one-way

ticket to Harvard. And then what happens is the test center is like, great, we created this structure. And then many people, then suddenly what happened is like many people started getting two 70s, two 80s, getting perfect scores on this test out of Nepal. And so finally, at some point someone figured out, right, the USMLE, which is the US medical licensing exam group, figured out that someone is cheating because suddenly in Nepal like 50% of people or 20% of people are getting perfect scores. That can't be right. So then what they did is they avoided all of their scores. Everybody gets to zero. You get an automatic fail. And there was a flood of posts on the medical school subreddit's about, oh my God, I've been failed. I've been failed. I've been failed. I didn't

do anything wrong. I didn't do that. Everyone's like, fuck you. You got caught, bitch. Right? Cheaters deserve to get caught. But what I want you all to think about is the first person. The first person who figured something out gets a ticket to wherever they want to go. So why do students cheat? Because it works. Because it's the way to get ahead. Because tax evasion means more money. Because it's insider trading unless you're a member of Congress.

Why do students cheat? Look at the world we live in. Stupid cheaters don't get ahead. Smart cheaters are like, there's so much corruption. At the highest, I'm not talking about the U.S. and I'm not blaming anyone in particular. I mean, just in general, right? So don't get triggered by a particular political party.

Just like, look at the world. Pretend you're an alien and tell me there isn't political corruption in like 50 plus percent of countries across the globe. I read this book called Shantaram, which is a book about India. And there's a great quote in Shantaram. It's a fiction book. India is the only country with the honest bribe. Bribes are simply the way that business used to be done there is arguably still done there. I don't really know.

I don't live there. This is why people cheat. And make no mistake that I've even seen this, right? So in my office, I've had people who are in banking, who are entrepreneurs. It's like all these like, what's funny is I saw a great quote that the Forbes 30 under 30 has a remarkable pipeline to prison. So we have these companies like, what is it, Theranos and FTX and like all these like billionaire kind of companies. All these like gigantic companies where like, oh, it's actually like a Ponzi scheme. Who's that Ponzi scheme guy?

made off, right? And you wonder, why do people cheat? Because it's the way to get ahead. Now, I want to be clear about something. Oftentimes when you explain a phenomenon, people think you are advocating for it. And here's what I've sort of seen. I'm not. So I am of the mind that you should do things honestly. I'm of the mind that hard work does pay off. So let's be clear about how successful cheating is. So if you want a reliable way to get into the top of top 25th percentile of success, then cheating is not the way to do it. If you want to do a good job, you want to become a doctor, I don't think you should cheat. I think the majority of doctors do not cheat. The majority of people who are in the top 25 percent, I don't think cheat. I don't

think you should cheat. I don't think it's good to cheat. But just because I don't think it's good doesn't mean it isn't fucking effective. There's a big difference between what is right and is wrong and what works and what doesn't work. These are completely independent axes that many people have trouble separating. So please, God, do not think I'm advocating cheating. And the other really scary thing that I've done, because I sort of can't help myself, is like, when I work with someone who's a sociopath, I think about why didn't this person get caught? So I've worked in jails, and I've worked with people who are like an investment banking, right? And they have many features of sociopathy, like they have substance use and things like that. And there are a couple things that I

found that are really interesting. So the cheaters who don't get caught are the ones who aren't greedy. This is huge. Right? So I want you to imagine you're that testing center in Nepal. People flew under the radar. You can have a couple of blips. It's when the signal becomes so large that people notice. And like, there's a ton of corruption out there. There's a ton of cheating out there. But these people are flying under the radar because they are below the people who are at the top. There's the most egregious corruption in the world, and then there's like the corruption that is underneath that doesn't get headlines because it's smaller and more boring than the other stuff. And I've had some people in my office, man, who are just so good at this flying under the radar, right? Doing things like placing

a bribe for a toll contract. Like it's such a little thing that no one thinks about. But now every time someone uses this road, this money goes in my pocket instead of somebody else's. A little bits of corruption, but worth so much money. And so oddly enough, I think the most successful sociopaths are the ones who are not overly greedy. Also keep their narcissism in check, because sociopathy is correlated with narcissism. These are both like cult-custra-be things. And the most effective sociopath on the planet is one who knows when to stop, right? Doesn't keep going, doesn't want more, gets their money and then is able to hold it. High conscientiousness, low neuroticism, and leaves their ego at the door.

And those people you will never see research on. You'll see research on the people who grew so fast, the Forbes 30 under 30, that everyone was looking at them and they got scrutiny. And so I think if you're a professor and you want to know why do students cheat, it's because it's one of the most effective tactics. Think about what cheating is. It's getting the fruits of labor without the labor. You know what we call that when we work in corporate?

Efficiency. Optimization. Minimizing the denominator, maximizing the numerator. And the only time it's a problem is when you're stupid enough to get caught. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.

Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember, 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline is funded by the government in Canada.