What have you seen that proves the dumbing down of society that AI fosters?
For me, it was when my friend told me he uses Twitter AI to tell him things to buy. My hope for humanity was already gone, but that definitely didn't help it. That, and the fact younger people don't search anymore, they go right to a chat bot.
Facebook pushing AI friends to solve loneliness. It's like they heard about dead internet theory and thought it sounded good.
Taught for a while. Last few years students went from turning in plagiarised essays with small enough tweaks to pass detection to full on LLM-written bullshit that they couldn't even explain when asked. The turning point was when parents started defending their kids submission of AI slop, even when it would begin "As a language learning model,..."
Really it just comes down to laziness. We can't ignore it as a tool, but man is it going to make a lot of people dumb. I also foresee many of the dumb ones thinking they are actually the smart ones, and self thinkers will be viewed as stupid. Definitely not out of the question.
100% agree. I regularly use spellcheck and access encyclopedias / dictionaries to doublecheck myself. I think grammarly was a great invention. But, once it went from analyzing voice/tone/mood to fully written block text many people just assumed they didn't have to learn to write anymore. My humble brag is that I don't use predictive text on any device. That makes me slower than others to respond. But in my mind it means I have to think about how to articulate just a bit more and, personally, I think I read more closely because of that too.
Vibe coding. I’m seeing my highly intelligent department of software developers pick up their new AI-powered IDEs and immediately start phoning it in. I’m being asked to review code that was obviously written by AI, obviously not understood by the „author“, and obviously does not and cannot work. And it’s happening more and more as we „increase our velocity“. I’m very worried for the next generation.
But I also go to a chat bot to get search results. It used to be you could use google and add some + and - keywords to narrow down what you need. Now the results are so terrible (once you scroll past all the AI slop and advertising) that it’s completely unusable for searching for anything that isn’t shopping.
I read somewhere on here that if you add the word fucking to the search, it doesn't contain AI and can't be used for AI training. I have not tried it, myself.
That may work, but has its own downsides. Say you're looking for a reference photo of really any object, but in the worst case scenario a child or an animal... You'll be on a bunch of watch lists in no time flat.
I add before:2022 to a lot of my searches but that has its obvious issues too
People fact-checking me with incorrect information fed to them by Google AI search.
Reading comprehension and writing are two things that stand out to me. I've noticed people don't want to expend the mental effort to read long prose so they'll just ask for a summary of it. Same goes for writing emails or reports.
Critical thinking skills are a like muscle that needs to be used or else it will atrophy. Asking AI to think for me is like going to the gym and asking the trainer to lift weights for me.
I found out that someone in my team at my old job ran nearly email with a prompt “edit this so I don’t get fired”
I heard a "person" create a plural form of a noun wrong in polish (czarodziejowie instead of czarodzieje). His interlocutor pointed it out and the grammar offender asked ai and it told him that: yeah, sure, this is a more formal, older way of saying that. Which is 100% wrong. The interlocutor promptly apologised.
The funny thing is that this is the same "mistake" as Tolkien's "dwarves" vs "dwarfs" translated into polish (krasnoludowie vs krasnoludy), but I am fairly certain that that person had not known it.
Maybe not dumbing down, but I can't ask friends for opinions without them telling me to ask an AI instead.
If I wanted an "opinion" from an LLM I would've done that instead. If I'm asking in chat I want YOUR opinion.
Spell-check, happened over a decade ago
Ewww search? What's wrong with people not going straight to their encyclopedia Britannica?
Eww encyclopedia? What's wrong with asking your village elder?
Eww village elder? What's wrong with performing a series of experiments yourself in order to learn the truth
AI is not a development in technology. It's like Flexplay, asbestos filters for cigarettes, and leaded gasoline.
You can't really know that for certain yet, it's barely in it's infancy at this point. There are new improvements to it literally daily at the moment, it's going to keep getting noticeably better for years before the improvements slow down.
ChatGPT isn't searching anything, dude. It's slightly more sophisticated than the predictive text on your phone.
ChatGPT has a web search mode that does incorporate real time results into it's output.