I found an interesting comment recently on the advent of AI, which very succinctly sums up the feeling of myself and perhaps many others who have glimpsed the abilities of AI LLMs over the past year. It goes like this:
"There are ways in which AI is remarkable, and I would never go back. That said, there is genuine reason to worry that this new tool will only accelerate the decline of language, culture, and learning generally. Such are the paradoxes of technology: sometimes that which is designed to save us actually destroys us."
I have wondered how kids today will learn new info when they can get a chatbot to print out the answers to their homework.
Teachers do have the ability to run essays through an AI that will detect if the essay is also AI, so all is not lost. But something might be lost.
For example when the calculator was introduced, we gave up a lot of our manual math. The calculator did it for us. Now it's ubiquitous and constantly used among students I presume.
When the mobile phone arrived, we gave up the need to remember phone numbers because the phone stores them for us. In this way, we gain some tools, but our brain loses the need to work as hard and thus perhaps loses what our predecessors had when it comes to brain training and ability.
When YouTube arrived it shifted learning even further from written word in books to visual video imagery and spoken word. I'm not saying this was a bad thing, just that it shifted the mentality of those young enough to be most influenced by it. As a result attention span has shrunk and the ability to - or interest in - reading a book has shrunk. It's much easier and nicer to consume video content, even if it's learning.
Now that LLMs have arrived, like ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek and many others, anyone can access almost any info in seconds without the need to read or research.
Also with these AI tools, all our manual white collar work is also taken. We can outsource all our secretarial, correspondence, marketing and other admin duties to the chat bot. All our digital image work can now be done in a fraction of the time too.
In fact both visual and audio art can be composed for us, as well a poetry and creative writing. Why the need to build our artistic skills any more, if AI can do it for us in an instant? Will our artistic brain skill go the way of our phone number memory capacity? The need for humans to train their brains to perform many skills may simply disappear.
Will our language skills shrivel up like an unused fruit due to less reading, less use of language and less writing? It's possible. How has language already become more simplified in the younger generations that have grown up with tech and live online more than ever before?
I'm not against being online as I live and work here too. I'm not against change, cultural evolution and progress. I am, however, concerned that our crucial skills may be lost.
Language shapes our reality, especially our inner world of ideas, concepts, states of consciousness and all sorts of other abstract nuances. If you don't have the words, then you won't be able to grasp the concepts or even know they exist.
That's how civilizations get dumbed down by their overlords who know that ignorance facilitates our ability to be controlled. The illiterate are easily pacified with bread and circuses. And chat bots. One way or the other it's a brave new world since the arrival of the AI era of LLMs. It's a big shift for us humans, having these new tools.
Let's hope is speeds up our learning and knowledge transfer for the best, without sacrificing anything in our brains that's actually worth cultivating, like math or memory.... or emotional intelligence.
Society will have to wait and see what happens because we're all in a massive experiment right now, the result of which no one can really truly predict.
Image: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/scifi-futuristic-woman-ai-generated-8769512/