Good Things Come to Those Who Take

I'm not an alarmist by nature, I promise. Things develop at such a warpspeed that we both need to assume they'll fuck everything up and that they'll be irrelevant next month. Much of AI will forgotten soon, I'm sure of that. Too much of it is the same thing with a different coat of paint, contributing nothing and changing less.

There's a need to acknowledge that a group of people is growing up with AI being a cool new thing, reported to be so smart and so creative. It changes the dynamic they enter the world with, just like my generation was heavily influenced by older social media as we entered the world. One place the influence pops up is the classroom. I've seen a few different reports from teachers about how AI is effecting things, but this one in particular sticks with me.

weird interaction with a student this week. they kept coming up with weird "facts" ("greek is actually a combination of four other languages") that left me baffled. i said let's look this stuff up together, and they said ok, i'll open a search bar, and they opened... ch*tgpt

and i was like "this is not a search bar" and they were like "yes it is, you can search for anything in here"

the thing that made me feel crazy is like. every kid that's using this as a browser is getting new BESPOKE false "facts." this isn't "a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it's taught in schools." each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine

with the "widespread misconception about X" you can start at a baseline. like, ok, in tenth grade we all talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world

but with this, each child is getting UNIQUE wrong facts they are SURE are correct... because they did what we told them to do! they "looked it up"! they got it from somewhere! it's not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption... it's something they think they LEARNED

this kid was extremely combative with me, and i understood why. i was sitting in front of him and telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things... were wrong. and that i, one person, was right. he basically *couldn't* believe me.

he decided that i was simply a teacher who'd made a mistake. he could check it, after all! he could look it up! he could find the REAL facts. i obviously hadn't done that, i was just an adult who'd decided i was smarter than him. hence the defensiveness. like i said: i understood

it was so fucking rough. i did my best, but i am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. this kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors

-stilloranged, original account deleted, archive here, now on bsky.social

I can't convince myself this is an isolated incident. I really want to, but it sounds right. These frustrations are not isolated either.

If this is the problem I'm thinking it is then I don't know if there's any particular fix. One kid, they can be talked to. But millions? That's a different beast altogether. I see no future in which schools widely clamp down on it either, given that so many have invested in one of the many startups jockeying for their attention, and the teachers reliant on it will whine until things go back how they were. On top of that, even if there were a coordinated effort to remove AI from schools, it's an arms race against a group with literally nothing better to do than to try and find loopholes: the students.

With more widespread adoption and proliferation of AI across the country, I see a generation growing with an even more stunted ability to critically think and evaluate information. Their stunting further exacerbated by the fact that my generation before them was already stunted by the internet, and the generation before us by lead exposure. I also see a rise in antisocial behaviors and recluses, given how accessible any type of "person" is available on command with AI (see earlier post, On AI and Companions).

And so, here we are. Things will quietly change and get worse, like they always do. Yet again because of silicon valley elites choosing to "move fast and break things" rather than reflect on and acknowledge dangers in what they're doing. The best hope right now is that they run out of money, but given how deadset VC firms are on being the one to make it big with AI, it seems unlikely they'll turn the money hose off any time soon.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and do small things to make the lives of those in Silicon Valley worse, since they do that for me. I'd encourage you to do so as well. Cause problems for your local school board, which is most likely infested with little right wing weirdos. At least they're forced to sit there and listen. Finally, don't fall for child protection legislation like KOSA(more details here), which is still trying to make its way through congress. If your congressperson is supporting it, please reach out to them! Anyways bye.