In Defense of Cluely.com

Sometimes cheating is good, actually

People are mad online about the latest AI affront to human dignity. I’m talking about the Cluely.com launch — if you haven’t seen the video, take a moment and watch it:

The company’s launch website is similar in its vibes and claims to the slick launch video linked above: a lot of talk about how great it is to use AI to cheat at things like job interviews, quizzes, and so on.

In this post, I am going to defend this abomination. But before you smash that “Unsubscribe” button, please hear me out.

The smart glasses on me recognize the smart glasses on you

The Cluely launch is much lamented on my feed, even by staunch defenders of AI, as the epitome of all that is wrong with AI hype, or VC, or whatever it is you’re against. But c’mon, people: the stuff in this Cluely video and website was always part of the whole AI package deal from Day One.

⚠️ Longtime readers of this newsletter may recall how I warned you in February 2023 that exactly this was coming.

🔐 Across every part of our society, access control just got a lot harder.

• Any security that relies on voice authentication will fall to high-quality, open-source text-to-speech models like Eleven Labs.

• Gatekeeping strategies that rely on the evaluation of written output are already falling to ChatGPT. This is true for all applications and essays that are produced solely for the purpose of being evaluated by someone else for determining access to a scarce resource.

• Computer-assisted coding tools are already good at finding security exploits and will get better, soon.

So in every place where we’re using voice, video, and the written word to gate-keep in some form or fashion, we’ll need to rethink that immediately.

Like electricity, nuclear energy, smartphones, the wheel, and every other powerful, disruptive tool we humans have invented, bad guys can use AI for bad, and good guys can use AI for good. And often enough, the bad guys are the earliest adopters, while the good guys are left struggling to catch up. But they do catch up, eventually.

Not only is it going to take us a minute to rewire our entire society to take account of generative AI, but Cluely’s launch pitch is a kind of public service announcement for people who still don’t get it and who are doing an ostrich thing on the AI revolution. It’s time for us to get creative about vetting and gatekeeping in the era of generative AI.

It’s really not that hard to dream up mitigations for the AI-based exploits on display in the Cluely launch. We can make people take tests in person. We can come up with tech that recognizes smart glasses — maybe even smart glasses can recognize smart glasses.

For every threatening AI exploit, there is always a patch. The proposed patch may involve more AI, or the blockchain, or some other tech you’ve already decided you hate, but then when these ideas get floated it becomes easy to figure out who actually cares about solving the underlying problem vs. who is just on a crusade to outlaw a thing they don’t like and is looking for anecdotes to buttress their case.

But instead of talking more about the bad aspects of Cluely, I want to talk about the potential upsides.

The demo is dumb, but the promise is real

Alright, so the kid in the demo was trying to use his AI-powered smart glasses to solve a problem that he apparently has: a total lack of what the kids call rizz.

I, a father of three, do not have this young man’s particular problem — I do not lack rizz (obviously), and even if I did, rizz is no longer in the critical path of anything I am trying to obtain.

But I do have other, more dad-specific problems. For instance, I am a dad who sometimes has to do things to cars — like change a windshield wiper, or check a fluid level, or interpret a dash light, or put some chains on tires. This usually involves holding my phone in one hand with YouTube playing, and doing the car thing with the other hand.

I also have to do things around the house that involve hot water heaters, breaker boxes, generators, and many other tasks that, again, involve a mix of YouTube, PDFs from manufacturer websites, tools, and frustration.

I want the Cluely glasses real bad for these kinds of tasks. I want to “cheat” on every single upgrade, repair, replacement, hack, and monkey patch that I do as a homeowner and automobile driver.

If I owned a factory, I would want employees to “cheat” with Cluely as they worked the machines and did all their troubleshooting and QA.

If I owned a restaurant, I would want newly hired waiters to use Cluely to identify by name any repeat customers and their recent orders, and I would also want to have some scripts ready for them (just like in the video) about the specials and what to do in situations where the food is late and the customer is mad, and so on.

I could make up examples all day — it doesn’t even take much imagination. AI-augmented AR has tons of obvious potential to yield massive savings in employee training and onboarding in many categories of businesses. Plus, again, the “Home Depot”-type consumer applications are endless.

Cluely is ultimately just one example of a new category of AI-enabled tools that will change how we live and work. Maybe Cluely itself will go bust — I have no idea if the founder knows what he’s doing, or not. But something like this has the potential to make all our lives a little easier and to instantly upskill many types of employees.

So I think Cluely is kinda great, or at least it points the way to something great. I could certainly do without all the obvious scumbaggery on display in the launch, but all of that aside, there’s definitely something here. Again, I just rewatched that launch video through my dad eyes and thought, “I could’ve used this to change out that hot water heater last year.”

So here’s to Cluely — or, at least, to the virtuous, practical version of it that’s inevitably coming to market. Sometimes it’s good to take AI-powered shortcuts.