alt Hacker News> I don't get people for whom it's just about winning, I wish everyone would just have some basic form of dignity and respect.
reminds me of something I read in "I’m a high schooler. AI is demolishing my education." [0,1] emphasis added:
> During my sophomore year, I participated in my school’s debate team. I was excited to have a space outside the classroom where creativity, critical thinking, and intellectual rigor were valued and sharpened. I love the rush of building arguments from scratch. ChatGPT was released back in 2022, when I was a freshman, but the debate team weathered that first year without being overly influenced by the technology—at least as far as I could tell. But soon, AI took hold there as well. Many students avoided the technology and still stand against it, but it was impossible to ignore what we saw at competitions: chatbots being used for research and to construct arguments between rounds.
high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun. now they're using chatbots in order to generate arguments that the students can just regurgitate.
the end state of this seems like a variation on Dead Internet Theory - Team A is arguing the "pro" side of some issue, Team B is arguing the "con" side, but it's just an LLM generating talking points for both sides and the humans acting as mouthpieces. it still looks like a "debate" to an outside observer, but all the critical thinking has been stripped away.
0: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/high-...
> high school debate used to be an extracurricular thing students could do for fun.
High school debate has been ruthless for a long time, even before AI. There has been a rise in the use of techniques designed to abuse the rules and derail arguments for several years. In some regions, debates have become more about teams leveraging the rules and technicalities against their opponents than organically trying to debate a subject.