Also, people keep asking why I use AI for information. I’m not sure if they are aware that pretty much everybody under the age of 25 uses AI for information about 99% of the time. Yes, I know how to find reliable sources. Moreover, I know that AI is ideological and manipulative. But young people don’t. My 19-year-old students have absolutely no idea. It’s important to know how they learn about the world.
This is a big change. Previously, young people got their answers from a newsfeed that by default included all sorts of voices. And now they moved to a completely different kind of social media and use ChatGPT for information. If that’s not disturbing, I don’t know what is.
“everybody under the age of 25 uses AI for information about 99% of the time”
It’s terrible but in some ways it’s hard to blame them since search engines like google have turned into ad-delivery systems and turning anything else into a reliable source of information takes skills that have disappeared.
Here, they also mostly don’t know how to format documents… they mostly use online formats with terrible options (that they don’t even use).
For years I saw Polish student becoming more and more tech savvy (far more than I was) and then smartphones appeared their abilities just…. plummeted. It was scary to see.
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“and then smartphones appeared”
This. I hate those things.
Over the last few years, even as I have amassed more interesting and useful resources on, say, music– a technical thing that I now help other people learn– it has become harder and harder to share those resources, because I’m looking at them on a desktop machine, attached to a laser printer, and they’re looking at it on an itty-bitty handheld screen. It just doesn’t work as well that way.
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So I guess we are going back to the days when kids copied their answers out of the encyclopedia.
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