A Future Worth Thinking About

It’s really disheartening and honestly kind of telling that in spite of everything, ChatGPT is actively marketing itself to students in the run-up to college finals season.

We’ve talked many (many) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to systems built by people who have repeatedly, doggedly proven that they will a) buy into their own hype and b) refuse to ever question their own biases and hubris. But additionally, there’s been at least three papers in the past few months alone (1, 2, 3) demonstrating that over-reliance on “AI” tools diminishes critical thinking capacity and prevents students from building the kinds of foundational skills which allow them to learn more complex concepts, adapt to novel situations, and grow into experts.

That lack of expertise and capacity has a direct impact on people’s ability to discern facts, produce knowledge, and even participate in civic/public life. The diminishment of critical thinking skills makes people more susceptible to propaganda and other forms of dis- and misinformation— problems which, themselves, are already being exacerbated by the proliferation of “Generative AI” text and image systems and people not fulling understanding them for the bullshit engines they are.

The abovementioned susceptibility allows authoritarian-minded individuals and groups to thus further degrade belief in shared knowledge and consensus reality and to erode trust in expertise, thus exacerbating and worsening the next turn on the cycle when it starts all over again.

All of this creates the very conditions by which authoritarians seek to cement their control: by undercutting the individual tools and social mechanisms which can empower the populace to understand and challenge the kinds of damage dictators, theocrats, fascists, and kleptocrats seek to do on the path to enriching themselves and consolidating power.

And here’s OpenAI flagrantly encouraging said over-reliance. The original post on linkedIn even has an image of someone prompting ChatGPT to guide them on “mastering [a] calc 101 syllabus in two weeks.” So that’s nice.

No wait; the other thing… Terrible. It’s terrible.

Understand this. Push back against it. Reject its wholesale uncritical adoption and proliferation. Demand a more critical and nuanced stance on “AI” from yourself, from your representatives at every level, and from every company seeking to shove this technology down our throats.