In this post I use words like tend, some, and many as qualifiers in front of the word youth. Please note those words and understand that I do not suggest that all youth fall under the umbrella of this commentary.
AI has turned education on its head. Around 10 years ago, schools pushed for work to be done on Chromebooks or iPads. That transition quickly finalized with the pandemic. AI has worsened the situation. Those devices—the Chromebooks and iPads now ubiquitous in schools—have become cheating devices. Teachers cannot block all of the AI websites or the AI content. Google has even embedded AI into its search engine as the default result.
Universities have pushed both faculty and students to embrace AI, and public schools have done the same. Some universities have purchased ChatGPT for their students.
Companies are also embracing AI. I mentioned in my previous post that eBay's default listing tool is now AI. Hospitals are turning to AI for some tasks and are reducing staff to save money. I have been to AI trainings offered by my school district. AI is everywhere, and we have gone a bridge too far with it.
While administrators are pushing for teachers and professors to integrate AI into everything, many educators are pushing for a return to paper and pencil. Reading and math skills have substantially declined over the last 20 years. The trend has considerably worsened since the pandemic.
All students now in grades K-12 were born after the release of the original iPhone. Their world is completely different from ours. They know nothing other than constant attachment to phones and apps. Children now become addicted to devices at a very young age.
Professors report that the average college student knows less about computers than people in the older cohorts. Since youth use apps instead of computers, they often don't know where to save files or how to find them. They struggle with sending messages containing attachments. If an app does it, then they are fine. Otherwise, they run into problems.
Youth tend to have a very short attention span. They are used to watching 20 second video clips on TikTok and reading messages consisting of partial sentences. Netflix has started making its programming very repetitive so that viewers can follow the story while on their phones. Schools have changed their reading curriculum so that students analyze short passages instead of novels.
Even those of us in the older cohorts have a lower attention span than we did 20 years ago. The pervasiveness of modern technology has impacted everyone.
Changes are underway, and schools are working to increase the amount of time students spend reading. But this mess will take years to overcome.
Meanwhile, AI isn't going away, and the anti-AI zealots viciously attack anyone who dares to mention that they have used AI. They attack because of the damage AI causes to the environment. I don't disagree about AI damaging the environment but attacking me isn't going to change anything.
Last year I created a subreddit for a certain modern series. In April, some people said that something was "settled years ago" without explaining what they meant. These people were almost certainly somewhere between the ages of 10 and 25, all part of the smart phone generation.
I find it hard to understand what many of these people write, because they use partial sentences that contain lots of text-speak. The overuse of phones and tablets has caused many people to now lack both communication and reading skills. The people saying that the topic was settled made vague statements expressing annoyance and failed to offer any specific information.
After several Google searches, I couldn't figure out how this topic had been "settled years ago." I used ChatGPT to figure out WHAT they meant and got my answer immediately. I made the fatal error of mentioning in a post that I had used ChatGPT.
Someone called me out on it and proceeded to post one comment after another criticizing me. I quickly deleted the comments as they kept coming. During the barrage, I finally managed to get across the fact that their anti-AI commentary didn't belong in the subreddit. They took it to private messages and really let me have it.
They called me "lazy" and went on and on about how I should use the brain that they knew I had and how AI use damages the environment. I told them to please stop. They continued going off on me. Finally, I told them I would have to remove them from the subreddit if they didn't stop. I was giving them one last chance to back down.
They increased the attack, saying that I was threatening them. They said that me deleting their comments from the subreddit was "childish." They told me my little subreddit wasn't that important. They were making these statements in an attempt to manipulate my emotions. I removed them from the subreddit and blocked them.
Reddit allows people to use the mod messages tool to contact admins about moderation, so this person used that to keep attacking. They went to all caps and told me to have a horrible f---ing day and some other stuff I don't remember. I then blocked them from mod mail and haven't heard from them since. You can be darned certain that I won't be mentioning AI on Reddit again.
The kicker is that theories have been posted in that subreddit that were obviously run through and heavily edited by AI. The telltale signs of AI use are all through those posts, but members love the content. In fact, they like those posts a lot more than anything I write, and that's because AI composes content that is designed to be addictive. Since the AI-written posts don't mention AI use, fans readily accept the content with no concern. Isn't that ironic? They happily consume AI so long as AI isn't explicitly mentioned. If someone says they used it, then they launch a war against the perpetrator.
The anti-AI zealots are hypocrites. All major websites now run everything through AI. As this person launched their attack on me, each one of their several dozen messages was run through AI. If these people are as against AI as they claim, then why are they even online? They might not be using AI directly, but their actions are causing AI to be used.
By the way, the posts in this blog—all 2400+ of them—were not written or even assisted by AI. I write my own content, thank you very much. Yes, I do use em dashes, but they are my em dashes. They are not AI. Because of the sheer volume of written content that I have placed online, I was deeply offended when this person called me "lazy" for using ChatGPT. Me, lazy? Hardly.
I mentioned that youth often have trouble reading more than short passages. Interestingly, even the youth who love to read tend to have trouble reading between the lines and fail to spot when an author is deliberately misleading readers. They read only at surface level and tend to take everything literally.
I've also noticed that when someone like me writes a lengthy post on Reddit in any place frequented primarily by youth that the person posting is often accused of using AI. Indeed, youth tend to think that good writing is AI.
Reddit has really opened my eyes about how reading and writing skills have declined over the last decade. Getting rid of AI is not the answer; rather, we need to strike a balance.
From MIT Says AI Is Forcing a Rethink of College Itself:
The University of Sydney has gone further operationally. Its assessment system now uses what it calls a two lane model. One lane contains secure, often in person work designed to verify what students can do independently. The second permits relevant tools, including AI, so students learn how to use them in realistic settings.
That structure gets at a tension every university now faces. Graduates need AI fluency as employers are already asking for it. Yet a university that never verifies what a student can do without AI risks certifying the output of a machine rather than the capability of a person.
Students do need to know how to use AI, but they must first master the skills themselves.
Note: Not all youth have poor communication skills or low reading skills. I want to be clear about that. Many of our youth are remarkably well-educated. The AI crisis falls into the category of "the more things change, the more they stay the same." There has always been something threatening the current societal order. We've survived radio, television, video games, and internet. Now we face struggles tied to smart phones, social media, and AI. We will survive this as well, but the 2020s will be remembered as a time of great upheaval and change.
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