I teach 18 year olds who range in reading levels from preschool to college, but the majority of them are in the lower half that range. I am devastated by what AI and social media have done to them. My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good “when used correctly.” I ask them, “How does one use it correctly then?” They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks. They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching. If I were to quit, it would be because of how technology has stunted kids and how hard it’s become to reach them because of that.
This isn’t much different from what teachers said about the internet, search engines, and Wikipedia…
It’s quite different. The web in the 90s wasn’t dominated by 4 web sites controlled by an algorithm.
And they were right. Those tools are alright if you know how to verify information, but ease of access to information dulls that ability.
It is so much different.
Kids might have plagiarised, but they weren’t utterly inept and brainwashed by the almighty algorithm.
Kids didn’t all repeat the same lines they all heard from a thousand different sources.
Sure,some weren’t the brightest, but it wasn’t all lock step, no actual original thought, unconscious, gobbledygoook.
Even the less intelligent at least had something to say that came from within, not without.
And it isn’t just kids.
The amount of people I’ve tried to speak with who, though completely separate in life and station, repeat the EXACT SAME LINES.
We are fucked.
I’ve noticed this, too. Grown adults in their 30s and 40s just repeat things they’ve seen on the internet, word for word, as though they’re providing a meaningful contribution to a conversation. It’s so bizarre.
I dunno, I some of the same junk and oft-repeated lines decades ago. We literally have a phrase for it: “Old wives’ tales”.
Having taught “kids these days”, I have still seen independent and creative thought in the majority of them.