AI Allows You to Make Yourself Stupid
Don't let it do your research. Don't let it read for you. What's left?
I watched a video the other day where a creator looked into the camera and said, “This AI app is how I’m top of my class at UCLA.”
Curious, my thumb hovered over the video, poised to swipe, yet wavering.
She held up her phone and slapped it onto the back of a Colleen Hoover book, where her phone proceeded to read the text (I presume) at 3.1x speed.
After showing off the app, this creator finished the ad by saying, “This app is how I get through all my readings…”
Summarization. Recitation. Comprehension.
These tasks can be performed by a third party, and many employ AI to do them.
Many of you have seen the image of the college student showing off the ChatGPT prompts he used to ‘earn’ his degree. I assume his example is one of many. Recalling my mindset as a 21-year-old, I wouldn’t have hesitated to employ a chatbot to solve my math homework.
It’s an easy A.
But it’s also a disaster for humanity as a whole.
I recently watched an Ezra Klein interview. In it, he gave this fantastic quote: “Having AI summarize a book or paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made… I think it’s the time I spent researching that was the most important time. Having AI research for me is a bad idea.”
We give something of ourselves when we create. I give you a little piece of me in this, in the Compendium shows, in other creative pursuits. You give me a little piece of you with your attention.
This giving is not selfless. I get something out of the bargain. In giving, I signal to you my humanity. In studying history, I find other human signals, gather them, and let their stories marinate within me.
The Creative Act cannot be manufactured, cannot be replicated. It is unique to each of us in our way. In the same way, I cannot tell you how to create; it is something you intuit within yourself. Thus, creative advice must always be caveated with something like, “this is what worked for me,” and an unspoken wish that it does for you.
But I cannot know, I can only take part in this free exchange of myself with you.
This exchange requires something, though; it requires a free human exchange. You, on the one hand, must be capable of intuiting the little breadcrumbs of myself I’ve sprinkled throughout the thing I’ve created, and I must have dropped some breadcrumbs for you to find.
AI wrecks the exchange.
If I short you on your breadcrumbs, you might find something minor was lacking. It would be just beyond grasping, but it would feel off, somehow. And if you short me on the receiving end, by having it summarized, you’ll miss out on the breadcrumbs I’ve left for you.
By streamlining the process, AI ruins the whole thing. The connection is severed. And while the information might remain, the human element is gone. Once this connection you and I share is removed, we are no different from giraffes; we lose what makes us human: the ability to share ideas in a decentralized conversation.
So, can AI remove some of the toil involved in studying? Perhaps. But can it produce the same result you would have otherwise achieved in a longer period of struggle? Certainly not. It cannot, also, account for what you feel when reading. Stripped of that emotion, even reading as fact-finding is emasculated.
There’s a saying often thrown around about mediocre football teams—or any mediocre competitive team.
The observer will often sigh, rub their forehead, or show some other sign of frustration and say, “[insert team name here] plays down to the competition.”
Translation: When excellence is necessary, the team conjures excellence; when mediocrity is required, they stoop to mediocrity.
AI, for all its apparent usefulness, creates endless scenarios where only mediocrity is required of its user.
Why bother diving into historical archives when ChatGPT can access the expanse of the internet? Why bother sitting with a 1,000-page Andrew Roberts biography when a chatbot can give you the Reader’s Digest version?
“AI removes the mundane!” you might say.
And you’ve missed the point. Mundanity is the point of study. Boredom is a gift. The unknowable processes by which your brain interfaces with information are the processes of learning itself. Once those processes are removed, so is learning.
And thus I wonder if the advent of AI will inevitably turn us into troglodytes because we are unable to keep our use of it to truly mundane processes. Humans, after all, have a long history of creating Frankensteins, only to act surprised when they turn on us.
You may wonder if I find any use for AI, whatever. I’ll grant that there are mundane actions that AI can solve. SEO, Hashtags, Data analysis, Process auditing, Cybersecurity, and Fraud detection all could benefit from AI.
But keep it the hell away from learning and reading. I worry that as a species, we’re stupid enough already; let’s not allow idea automation to make it worse.
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I also welcome your thoughts in the comments. If I’ve learned anything about this topic, it’s that it is a dialogue.
See you soon,
Josh
Preach it brother. Feels like we are all sleep walking into the Truman Show.