'Animal House,' AI And The Rise Of Intechication

Innovation'Animal House,' AI And The Rise Of IntechicationByWayne Lonstein,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 04, 2026, 09:00am EDTWayne Lonstein, CEO, VFT Solutions, Inc. Anti-Piracy, Social Media and Cybersecurity law and practice. getty​Here’s an old proverb: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Artificial intelligence is rapidly creating a dangerous third category: “Let AI fish for him long enough, and eventually he forgets how to fish at all.”Ironically, the 1978 comedy Animal House, a favorite of mine, came to mind when I was writing this article. I was a freshman at a small Pennsylvania school when the film came out. I lived in a Delta house exterior dormitory, so I could immediately relate to the characters in the movie. It was a defining moment for me in an era of immense change, with events like the Iranian hostage crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the 1979 energy crisis topping headlines.Animal House may explain the danger better than many modern AI conferences. In one memorable scene, fraternity members desperate to pass an exam sneak into a dumpster searching for discarded answer sheets. They do not want to learn the material. They want the shortcut. But the rival fraternity anticipates the cheating attempt and intentionally plants fake answers in the trash. The students confidently memorize incorrect information, believing they have outsmarted the system.They confused access to answers with actual understanding. Modern society is beginning to make the same mistake with AI.For centuries, education, science and innovation revolved around mastery rather than merely achieving outcomes. Students struggled through equations because the struggle built reasoning. Scientists repeated experiments because the...