Sobering article, and very well said. Critical thinking is being threatened by over reliance.
I've always wondered -- it seems like the world is still reeling over the effects of social media, and the democratization of information. We mostly really haven't coped. And now AI is here.
I don't think the answer is avoiding AI entirely. I think the answer is learning to think critically even while leveraging AI -- which of course is a much harder thing to do.
I think we're not realizing, but humanity is going through a learning phase now, because we don't really know how to handle that much information. This is still new to us. Social media is roughly 20 years old, but the interest is only growing.
I've read a recent study that a high school student may spend up to 5 hours a day on social media.
Five hours. Per day. Every day.
I find this disturbing.
This type of engagement - which borders addiction - combined with AI's capabilities of effectively sifting through large amounts of personal data for profiling and targeting, makes for a great tool to control and manipulate. Also a very dangerous combination in the wrong hands.
This is the biggest concern, right? Critical thinking and the ability to discern fact from fiction are already major issues. While AI boosts productivity and can sometimes outperform human effort, it also risks eroding critical thinking skills. I’ve been saying this for months—how people learn to write in the future will look nothing like how we learned. You really have to wonder what that will mean for society down the line.
You example prompting on whether milk is good or bad is a great one as it better illustrates how AI subtle distorts depending on how it is led. The eloquence of LLMs are impressive, but I have instances where it has returned a correct answer yet when I asked for the URL of the article it supposedly referenced, it could not return the proper one. It calls the reliability into doubt.
Sobering article, and very well said. Critical thinking is being threatened by over reliance.
I've always wondered -- it seems like the world is still reeling over the effects of social media, and the democratization of information. We mostly really haven't coped. And now AI is here.
I don't think the answer is avoiding AI entirely. I think the answer is learning to think critically even while leveraging AI -- which of course is a much harder thing to do.
I think we're not realizing, but humanity is going through a learning phase now, because we don't really know how to handle that much information. This is still new to us. Social media is roughly 20 years old, but the interest is only growing.
I've read a recent study that a high school student may spend up to 5 hours a day on social media.
Five hours. Per day. Every day.
I find this disturbing.
This type of engagement - which borders addiction - combined with AI's capabilities of effectively sifting through large amounts of personal data for profiling and targeting, makes for a great tool to control and manipulate. Also a very dangerous combination in the wrong hands.
And guess in who's hands it is right now?
Just follow the money.
Exactly. Definitely a lot of cause for concern.
This is so true. Critical thinkers are more self-confidence. The more we rely on AI, the less we trust your own capacity to think clearly.
This is the biggest concern, right? Critical thinking and the ability to discern fact from fiction are already major issues. While AI boosts productivity and can sometimes outperform human effort, it also risks eroding critical thinking skills. I’ve been saying this for months—how people learn to write in the future will look nothing like how we learned. You really have to wonder what that will mean for society down the line.
You example prompting on whether milk is good or bad is a great one as it better illustrates how AI subtle distorts depending on how it is led. The eloquence of LLMs are impressive, but I have instances where it has returned a correct answer yet when I asked for the URL of the article it supposedly referenced, it could not return the proper one. It calls the reliability into doubt.