Panos Ipeirotis: Fighting AI With AI - January 6, 2026
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Prepare to have your mind blown as we delve into the complexities of relationships, explore the cutting edge of science, and celebrate the bizarre and beautiful absurdity of the world around us. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. Students are using AI to write their assignments in university. And perhaps the best way to fight that, fight AI with AI. One professor at NYU Stern School of Business ditched essays for AI-run oral exams. That's right, a professor is using AI to force students to think, explain, and prove they actually understand the work. The very thing that Chad GPT allows students to cheat on. I'm here with that professor. His name is Panos Ipirotis. Panos, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me.
So before we talk about the novel way that you've been preventing students from using AI in school, let's talk about the problem, a sort of existential crisis in universities right now, where students are just using large language models to pump out their assignments in seconds, in minutes. Talk to me about the state of things with that.
Yeah, let me start by saying I don't mind students using AI. Actually, in my class, I encourage students to use Ah, AI. However, what we noticed is that they don't yet know how to use it to their advantage. At least a subset of the students don't know how to do that. And they fully outsource their thinking to the machine. And this is something that we don't like. We want them to, even if they use ChatGPT and LLMs to create their deliverables, we want them to know what they deliver. We want them to know the material. And increasingly what happens is it's very hard to tell whether someone knows the material or not. It used to be you're getting the exam, the homework, you could tell, oh, this is, they don't know what they're writing about or they know what they're writing about.
What challenges do students face with AI in academic assignments?
Increasingly with LLMs, this becomes very hard to do for ETM exams.
I'm not going to admit to cheating, but in undergrad, I'll just say this. My ex-wife was an English literature major and I took one English lit class and somebody helped me with my essay. And I remember the teacher calling me to his office to go through my essay and started asking me questions about it and I couldn't answer them. Is that kind of the thing you're experiencing when you go through students with their work and then you ask them about it, they don't understand what they wrote?
Yeah, actually the assignments that we had in class, they were not even heavy duty. assignments, they were supposed to prepare students for the discussion that we're going to have in class. And instead of seeing the class being fully prepared for the class discussion, we're getting these very well-polished submissions, but silence in the classroom. And we realize, well, we need to do something. Otherwise, they will not learn anything by the end of the class.
So when you put a student on the spot and ask them to defend or explain their work, is that what you just observed? Like silence and lack of understanding? Blankly saying, I don't know.
I cannot say anything. Don't worry. Just say with your own words. Very simple. Silence. At that point, we were like, we need to do something.
Okay, so enter the oral exam. This is something that used to happen a lot in schools if we look in the last, I don't know.
Yeah, we still have it. Medical board exams, bar exams, you know. PhD defenses are all oral exams. This is the gold standard.
But when you have many students and many assignments over a term, the practical nature of grading oral exams, I don't know, let's just say you have 50 students and you want to do 10 assignments.
How is a professor using AI to combat student cheating?
I'm no mathematician, but that's 500 mini oral exams. It's just too much work for a professor, isn't it?
It's not even that it should too much work. The logistics of trying to schedule, you know, 50 different half an hour slots that are mutually convenient, just becomes very, very hard.
As the host of a radio show who exactly has to do that every day, I completely empathize with you.
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