Normalising Cheating

Heard of Cluely? Get ready to get smacked across the face with a fish.

I’ll throw some links in the bottom of this if you don’t know what i’m talking about read this first and consider this app.

I have been following the conversations around Cluely, the AI tool co-founded by Chungin "Roy" Lee and Neel Shanmugam. It's clear from the viral reactions that this is a platform designed to be divisive and is certainly achieving that aim - at the same time they’ve raised ~6million to get going. While its specific business model and marketing tactics, particularly the provocative viral launch video, have drawn significant criticism, I'm not here to focus on that, rather it’s a metaphor for what is coming.

This situation reminds me of your own experience, When I was in high school in the early 90's (I think I've written about this before). My handwriting was so bad I was failing essays as they couldn't read them, so I typed them out and subsequently failed as they assumed I was cheating (this is before mainstream access to the internet!). They didn’t understand that was I was trying to solve a readability issue, and jumped to it must be cheating cause its different! I ended up typing and writing them to prove I wasn't cheating. Now submitting a typed essay is normal. The same for the calculator, spell check (a godsend for my dyslexia), I could probably go on.

The manifesto argues that technology inherently pushes us to find faster, more efficient ways to "win", and that resistance to these new tools is a pattern that repeats throughout history, eventually leading to adaptation and normalisation. Seen through this lens, the strong negative reactions are perhaps predictable and a sign of the initial panic before adaptation occurs.

While Cluely itself is marketed for applications like interviews, exams, and sales calls- some of which are ethically dubious – what it demonstrates is the practical implementation of a concept that I’ve been speaking about (and keep forgetting to trademark) "knowledge in the moment." This isn't just about academic cheating or manipulating a date, it's about having the specific information you need, precisely when you need it, without having to recall it from memory or search through potentially irrelevant resources.

Let's translate this to the enterprise and SME context. Anyone who has worked for more than 5 minutes will be familiar with, departments producing lengthy "how-to guides" or procedural documents. These documents are comprehensive, but the reality is that most employees don't need to access this information frequently enough to commit it to memory. It gets filed away and is only needed for infrequent transactions or tasks, perhaps involving HR or other internal services. The cognitive load required to remember where to find that document, which version is current, and then scan it for the one piece of information needed for a once-a-year task is significant and unproductive.

This is where a controversial tool like Cluely, if we strip away the shock-and-awe marketing and its ethically fraught applications, provides a living, albeit extreme, example of the underlying capability. A tool that can see your screen (the internal form you're trying to fill out), hear your audio (the conversation with a colleague about a process) and instantly feed you the specific, relevant information from internal documentation in real-time is exactly the kind of "knowledge in the moment" solution the enterprise needs, and like it or not what we should be optimising for right now.

So, get your data (structured and unstructured) organised today - I realise my messaging is repetitive but it’s the starting point for everything. Sorry, not sorry.

The potential here is for workers to significantly remove cognitive load. Instead of dedicating mental energy to recalling infrequent procedures or searching for buried information, they can offload that to an AI assistant providing just-in-time knowledge. This frees them up to focus on the aspects of their job that do require human centric skills – critical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, empathy, and building relationships.

So, I really hope that Cluely doesn’t succeed with their current proposition and it’s just a platform to raise funding to build something useful. What it does do is start to open the worlds eyes to we need to rethink the way we work! It highlights the opportunity to redefine efficiency and productivity by effectively leveraging AI to provide knowledge in the moment, allowing human workers to concentrate their efforts on tasks that truly require their unique skills and intelligence.

Some links:

Cluely
Roy on X: "Cluely is out. cheat on everything”

Is it morally right to cheat with AI? Contradictory products deal with this idea in different ways.