Something happened. If we don’t address it, we lose.
The strange high school D.A.R.E classes tried to teach us that we if did drugs, we would end up a shell of our selves. We would become that “flat girl” Above The Influence PSA if we weren’t careful.
These PSAs urged against it all, all the while your gym teacher was proudly splaying out a buffet of drugs you’ve never heard of in front of you to learn about. But remember…don’t do them!
D.A.R.E insisted on all this, all years before it would cascade into monumental failures with the Opioid Epidemic and War On Drugs.
Congratulations, Anthropic and OpenAI. You’re better than cocaine.
We have, collectively, lost our damn minds. There’s flat girls all around us. It wasn’t oxycontin or Adderall this time around. Government and big business are pushing it just as hard, though.
It’s really freaking weird.
I swear to you, people were capable of writing without a chatbot two years ago. This all happened, fast.
The rhetoric shifted. Many people need the AI now. Need it. Can’t go a day without it. Hit it first thing in the morning.
“Everyone is doing it. It’s industry standard now. Get on board.”
“Oh, I don’t use it... It’s just a thinking partner.”
“It doesn’t matter. All the writers use it now.”
You’ve heard all the clever and easy-to-repeat marketing messages. All the writers don’t use it. I promise.
The Roanoke Rambler example is timely.
This article (https://www.roanokerambler.com/have-your-quesadilla-and-eat-it-too) came across my algorithm the other day. I can’t say I’m awfully familiar with this publication; perhaps the Roanoke Rambler is typically a wonderful media source. I would have scrolled past it, had the reactions not been so numerous.
That article is functionally, fundamentally, unreadable. Not like, “just not great writing” or “maybe the writer is just a newbie journo with bad form.” that we see in today’s media decline. It doesn’t have the flow or basic tenants of human writing. It repeats paragraphs entirely—a little too much chatbot “thinking partner” at play. The word salad is one only an LLM could come up with. A middle schooler with a thesaurus used to be significantly more capable.
The backlash was swift. Lots of comments, from people I know! This is one of the first times I’ve seen the public actually critique an AI thing and not just ignore it. Worse, the author doubled down instead of approaching it with some introspection. That’s just lame. But it’s not surprising in this age of outsourced thinking.
That was an illustrative example but there’s plenty to see every day.
You know what I’m talking about here. Any day to day examples I can give you cut a little too deep, so I’ll be very brief.
It’s media illiteracy, brought on by a technology that has become a reckless crutch. That’s what it is.
It’s asking for someone to explain what is written plainly, when the words are in front of them. If someone actually struggles with literacy, I have abundant empathy and patience.
That’s not the case, here. Those same people were reading and comprehending before this LLM hellscape. Now, so much thinking is outsourced and our brains simply atrophy.
It’s death by 1000 little cuts of lost thinking. If you don’t practice and repeat something, the ability goes away. If you outsource it to a little chat window, you become dependent on it.
We’ll call this an epidemic, eventually.
It’ll be too late and put us behind by many years. Having a public that’s not capable of thinking for themselves is an absolutely fantastic resource for governments and big business. Some massive and terrible event will rip us out of the collective illusion and it will hurt.
Don’t turn this into a “But AI helps me code so well!” argument. That’s great—you translate human speech into code a machine can read—wonderful! None of this is the AI that’s accelerating medical research or solving big questions in the universe. Don’t twist it around.
We’re talking human cognition. Our ability to reason and converse with people without devolving into fits of rage…that we see online and in real life everyday now.
What’s the fix?
Read. Write, without the chatbot open in the other window. No LLM touched any of these words. This was an hour, a couple iced coffees, and a man at a keyboard. Old school, baby.
Lean into the community around you. Meet your neighbors. Go for a walk. Talk to them face-to-face and embrace that awkwardness.
We’re two or three years into this shit. Let’s not make it decades of decline before we name it, address it, and do something about it.
Really sad to see writing with AI become a complete replacement for the writer vs. an actual companion that has no actual life experience or journalistic integrity. If a journalistic outlet is using AI to take their "notes" and write a published article, could they at least read it and edit it before hitting publish???? Unfortunately, along with the decreasing literacy and critical thinking rates, we're seeing a lack of ability to distinguish nuance, voice, and fact checking, which is equally deeply alarming if AI is so "omnipresent" that people will be using it for "research."
I've been reluctant, tried it for the first time b/c my 'words weren't wording' (happens to the best of us) and it was so simple and well written and I don't think I will use it again. Maybe if I'd stepped away from the computer, taken a break and come back the words would have been there! I don't want to stop thinking for myself!! Good read Jonathan, thank you!