The founder of the 'cheat on everything' startup Cluely says using AI in job interviews will soon be widely acceptable

Creating a tool that allowed job candidates to cheat on their technical interviews kicked off a chain of events that would eventually see Chungin "Roy" Lee kicked out of Columbia University — but he believes that, soon enough, everyone will be using AI to get ahead.

Lee has since branched out from an AI tool for coding interviews alone, founding "Cluely," which he's previously called "a cheating tool for literally everything," including live conversation. A promotional video for the app, for instance, depicts Lee using the app to "cheat" his way through a date.

"There's a very, very scary and quickly growing gap between people who use AI and people who moralize against it," Lee told Business Insider in an email. "And that gap compounds: in productivity, education, opportunity, and wealth."

"We say 'cheat on everything' because, ironically, we believe this is the only path towards a future that is truly fair," he added.

Lee talked more about his views on how AI use will impact interviews in a recent interview with EO.

"When every single person is using AI to cheat on meetings, then it's not that you're cheating anymore," he said. "This is just how humans will operate and think in the future."

Lee said he expected that in the coming years, interviews would be a lot more "holistic" and largely assess whether the candidate is a "culture fit," rather than focusing on a deep dive into their skills. That is, if the interview as a means of assessment endures at all — he predicts that AI will become powerful enough to build individual profiles for each candidate and feed that information back to the interviewer.

"I already know all the work you've done, or at least the AI already knows the work you've done," he told EO. "It knows how good it is. It knows what skills you're good at, and if there is a skill match, then I should just be able to match you directly to the job, assuming that we get along after like a 30-minute conversation."

It's a practice that's already commonplace at Cluely, where interviews tend to be less formal, Lee added.

"I really don't know that there is a need for interviews in today's age, but right now what we use is really just a conversation," he said. "We check if you're a culture fit, we talk about past work you've done, and that's pretty much it."

Lee said he expected AI to eventually alter more than just the job interview — he believes everyone will soon be using it as frequently and broadly as possible.

"The entire way we're going to think will be changed," Lee told EO. "Every single one of my thoughts is formulated by the information I have at this moment. But what happens when that information I have isn't just what's in my brain, but it's everything that humanity has ever collected and put online, ever?"

For instance, Lee posed, how different would an interaction between two people look if AI could feed one a "condensed blurb" of information about the other, after it was finished scraping their entire digital footprint?

"What happens when AI literally helps me think in real time?" Lee said. "The entire way that humans will interact with each other, with the world, all of our thoughts will be changed."

With Cluely, Lee hopes to get people used to what he believes is an inevitable transformation.

"The rate of societal progression will just expand and exponentiate significantly once everyone gets along to the fact that we're all using AI now," he said. "And that's what Cluely hopes to achieve, is to get everybody used to, 'We're all using AI now.'"

For Lee, it's simple — either get on board or fall so far behind you can't ever catch up.

"Mass adoption of AI is the only way to prevent the universe of the pro-AI class completely dominating the anti-AI class in every measurable and immeasurable outcome there is," he told BI.