Turns out ‘cheating’ with AI kinda sucks

As the old adage goes, if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself. And that apparently applies to trying to “cheat” with AI.

As you may recall, 21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee was recently suspended from Columbia University for building Interview Coder, an AI app that did the coding portion of tech job interviews for him.

Lee claimed it had worked on Amazon and other companies, which he either rejected or which rescinded their offers upon learning about the tool.

Lee doubled down…

… and raised $5.3m in seed funding to build Cluely, an AI tool to help people “cheat on everything” — sort of. The company compares itself to tools like calculators and spellcheck, which no modern person considers cheating.

How it works:

• Cluely reads screens and interprets audio, allowing it to feed users real-time advice or answers during virtual meetings, like interviews and sales calls.
• It can’t be detected by keyloggers or software that can see your screen, so, presumably, others won’t know it’s in play.
• It’s $0 to try a limited version or $20/month. Lee claims 80k people have downloaded the free version, while 700 are paid subscribers.

How is this helpful?

Lee told The Verge that Cluely could provide details about someone on a call as though you’d done 10 hours of research, and, in a conversation with 404 Media, seemed excited by the idea that you’d never have to memorize anything again — a real bummer for those who love pub trivia.

Lee also starred in an ad where he attempts to use Cluely — apparently installed in smart glasses despite being a desktop app? — to catfish a date into thinking he’s an older, successful software engineer.

It’s viral…

… but reviews are not good.

• The Verge’s Victoria Song experienced numerous technical issues while Cluely failed to understand context and took a long time to respond.
• Matthew Gault of 404 Media found answers to be generic ChatGPT output, which, again, took a while to generate.
• Neither deemed it viable for real-time conversations.

AI is useful for many things — summarizing documents, taking notes, etc. — and there’s perhaps a future for Cluely, but much like Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit r1, it simply isn’t there yet.

The good news is that spending 10 minutes Googling someone before embarrassing yourself on a date is still free.