An Ai App For ‘cheating’ Just Dropped

An AI app launched this week that feels like it was created by the classmate who barely notched a B-minus by copying your homework every morning. Cluely bills itself as allowing users to “cheat on everything” by tracking a user’s screen in a virtual meeting—like a job interview or a sales call—and offering up clever responses.

Its viral launch video demonstrated how the app can be used to lie to a date, prompting a deluge of comments referencing Black Mirror. But not everyone’s appalled: Cluely says it raised $5.3 million from investors and is charging the public $20/month for a subscription.

Columbia “cheater”

Cluely was launched by Columbia undergrad Chungin “Roy” Lee, who was recently suspended for a year for co-creating the app that became Cluely to help job candidates stealthily cheat on coding interviews. Lee claims to have used it to land offers from Amazon, TikTok, Meta, and Capital One.

This led to disciplinary proceedings at the university, but Lee is unbothered by the ethics of his creation. He viewed his job-landing tricks as a protest against LeetCode, a popular coding interview platform hated by many software engineers who consider its assessments burdensome and unrepresentative of their day-to-day work.

Despite billing itself as a “cheat at everything” hack…Cluely’s manifesto claims that its tool enables cheating only as much as a calculator or spellcheck does.—SK