Back when people did their own writing, thinking and reading. With the advent of AI to serve as perpetual ghost writers humanity may be entering a true dark age.
Yep
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
My company Neutrons ‘R Us is getting AI in part because employees cannot put two coherent sentences together to express a lucid thought. In a few years it won’t need those employees.
MS Outlook.. Teams… each have type ahead AI which is not only annoying and dumbing down… it reeks of conformity (be a good little bot) and will almost surely drive language evolution.
The English of today is not the Old English of yesterday; that change was human. The English of tomorrow will likely be what AI decides, not humans.
Should add that:
“Language and thought are deeply intertwined, with language acting as a framework that shapes perception, memory, and cognitive processing rather than just a tool for communication.”
And yes, an online AI search engine helped me with that. Powerful and frightening. It could be used for good, but in the wrong hands…
Many years ago I turned on the television and on it was the most twee thing you could imagine but very on brand for PBS. It was a set of interviews with ballerinas who had worked for George Balanchine at different points in his career. I was piqued by one thing you could immediately hear in the opening trailers. Four of the dancers – born in 1923, 1925, 1925, and 1937 spoke fluent grammatical English. The fifth, born in 1951, suffered the infiltration of conversational junk and filler. The last one, born in 1964, sounded like Moon Unit Zappa’s Valley Girl. It struck me that you could hear the same difference between how my mother (b. 1930) spoke and my sisters (b. ca. 1960) spoke. (Between my aunt (b. 1925) and my cousins (b. ca. 1953)) the difference was much less pronounced. I ask my mother about this and she said, “Well, you see, television did that….”. A couple of years ago, one of our extended shirt-tails sent a note to her great-grandmother. At age 17, she had the handwriting of a boy of 8.
By all accounts, today’s students cannot even read novels, or just even five pages of anything. Better to have AI summarize everything, you don’t have to think that way.
It is a loss of culture that we are experiencing; nothing permanent is being produced, but all is being ground to rubble in this age of video. We even see it in the Church. I often think that Pope Benedict was the last link to a written, creative Catholic culture and theology. Now nothing interesting or original is coming out of Rome.
If you can’t think critically and eloquently you can’t write critically and eloquently. AI has its place, like in the medical field and other scientific fields, but for the average person it just allows them to hand off their thinking to a machine. A machine that doesn’t care about them. Not a good look.
AI is pushed and pushed, but the smartest urbane people fear a diminishing of language and culture. The wise folks who are more salt of the earth realize something different – how much time and effort is *already* wasted trying to get computers to do what we want them to do.
Computers are similar to communism – we are always promised that the next upgrade will lead to paradise.
My trip to Paradise is through a pine box. Everything else is just hype.
Take a look at an old McGuffey’s reader and a modern textbook to see what level of comprehension was expected then and now. A former history teacher (ex-Navy) told his class about their writing: “If all you read in on the level of Winnie-the-Pooh, then you’re going to write like Winnie-the-Pooh”. I call this in his honor Sullivan’s Dictum: No student will write at a higher level than he reads.
(And compare A.A. Milne’s writing to what goes on on Sesame Street, to see what even preschoolers were thought capable of in 1920s Britain.)
I am going to blame the Prussian style education system. While there are exceptions, the vast majority of teachers in this system will “teach” students by prompting them for specific answers to stock questions. The students never learn the relevance of these questions, and in many cases never learn the way they fit together, so of course they are going to take whatever method lets them supply the answer without thinking about it.
Now it’s using generative AI. Five years ago it was using a smart phone to pull up Wikipedia and copy text over. Twenty years ago it was using a web search and plagiarizing that way. Forty years ago it was paying the nerd to do your homework for you, or using Cliffs Notes. Newer tools allow students to fill in the desired responses with less and less thought on the end of the student, but the attitude of trying to answer everything with as little thought as possible has been baked into the educational system since at least the 70’s.
The big problem now is that students do learn to approach life in general like they approach school, since we make school such a big part of their lives. So if they react in a natural way to busywork assignments in school by asking ChatGPT or Grok every question, then when they are “researching” on their own, they will do the same thing. I’ve seen younger people get asked a riddle, outside of school, for fun. Fifteen years ago the same aged people might look up the riddle online, but only after thinking about it. Now they will go immediately to ChatGPT without even parsing what the riddle even said. Because that is how we trained them to “think.”
But homeschooled children generally don’t do this, because they have been trained to actually research and learn.
So it won’t matter if we get rid of generative AI, unless we fix the educational system. We may make things better temporarily, but students will just find some new way to avoid thinking.
I make it a point to avoid AI. I won’t use it at work. I don’t care if they get rid of me over it.
I watched a lot of TV as a kid, but I was an avid reader. Books shaped my writing and thinking. Readers Digest, too.
My oldest son has some form.of autism, but his writing and spelling are horrid. My younger son speaks like a 19th century orator. Go figure.
If teachers love teaching, students will love learning.