literacy & ai

there's a decent chance i've alluded to this before in a post, but it's honestly super ridiculous to me that ai's come at such a terrible time. i doubt there are any in-depth studies about the impact of covid on society yet, but i think at the very least that there's been a noticeable deterioration of social norms like sneezing into your elbow and whatever. not that that's got a direct correlation with what i'm talking about, but it's sensible to believe that things that were commonplace previously are no longer as prominent in society today. even aside from attitudes shifting, there's just a clear degradation of skills in general. standardized testing scores have dropped a frankly unbelievable amount, and while america to begin with has never had a great education system, it's shocking how disproportionate the effect has been. i know i'm extremely privileged to have been raised where i was, but even there i've noticed a trend towards illiteracy. books that should not be hard for people to read have become hard, not since the words themselves are particularly difficult, but just because the sentence structures lose the readers halfway through. granted, that could be the result of a terrible writing style, but it gets to a point where it is the reader's fault. in any case, having established both a faltering in technical skills and attitudes towards literacy, ai becomes all the more insidious.

like, think about it. you're struggling to read basic texts, can't synthesize any original ideas of your own (side note that this is something that i fully believe is intentional; if you can't think, are you able to be anything but submissive?), and suddenly you've got this godsend. you've got this program that's seemingly able to magically dumb everything down to your level. there's zero intellectual growth being fostered and it's just a terrible feedback loop. the more ai becomes integrated into society, the more this laziness is encouraged. you're seeing everyone else do so, after all, so why wouldn't you do so yourself? it's just a terrible cycle that's feeding into itself, and as i've reiterated repeatedly and honestly almost to exhaustion, it's sickening.

anecdotally, i was running an errand the other day where i had to promote something to totally random people. i said something along the lines of what i said last paragraph, with "intellectual growth being fostered", and i got accused of reading off of a script. the only word i find to be remotely atypical in that example is foster. it's not even that advanced, but people treat anything that strays from their sanitized ai-ified summaries as intelligent. it just struck me as so incredibly tragic, but that's also quite pretentious of me and at least i'm aware enough to see that.

regardless, i've been meandering on for long enough. the point is just that literacy keeps on deteriorating as ai continues to get used for the most menial of tasks (500 mL of water for each search, by the way. just to keep the energy cost in mind), and especially in a post-covid world, this really does hurt. the elementary students and the middle school students today are set up in a uniquely vulnerable position where they've got an easy tool to exploit so that they can go off and play games. i get it, i get the appeal of having more free time. none of the blame is really on them; they are children and had i been in their position at that age with their experiences, i can't say i wouldn't have felt at least a bit like they do. ai's just come at such an unfortunate time, like i've said. i don't think any time would've been right for ai to come, given my hatred for everything that has to do with it, but it's especially bad now with social norms and basic life skills already hurting from the lasting impacts of covid.