AI Makes You Stupidererer

There’s still a lot of AI writing makes you stupider, or using AI makes you more stupid

And the people who are saying this must be using AI non-stop to have such an uninformed binary viewpoint on something like artificial intelligence.

This is true for all AI use

But if we focus on writing as an example - people will just take a study that suggests that in certain conditions, artificial intelligence use meant that when the individual came to try and remember what they’d written, they couldn’t remember it.

Which, apparently, directly translates to ‘this makes you stupid.’

If we ignore the fact that most people who say this would never treat research in their own specialist field like this - They wouldn’t just look at the news article headline of the study and assume that’s what the study shows.

How can you say that AI writing makes you stupid?

In my head, these people sound like Ralph Wiggum.

There’s a big change coming, and they’re sitting on a bus muttering ‘I’m in danger’ to themselves - because it feels inevitable that the change is bad, despite not ever stopping to think about it for themselves.

‘AI writing makes you stupid’

It treats writing as an undifferentiated act with a single quality score, whereas writing is actually a process with error and with variance in it.

The argument for me is really boring because nobody has said which parts of the process the AI actually touches.

There are lots of interesting questions within this question

Such as what is the error in a piece of writing? What is the variance? Who writes the same quality every single time and who doesn’t? Who is always refining their writing process and who has used the same one for years? What do great writers do that amateurs don’t do? Which parts of all of these questions does AI affect?

And separately, which ones does it improve? Which ones does it worsen?

Which one would you not even notice because it doesn’t touch it?

What really annoys me is when people say AI writing makes you stupid because you don’t remember what it was that was said.

You kind of just hand a piece of writing over to someone without remembering it.

Well yeah, because someone else has written it for you. So why would you remember it? This would be the same as if you got your parents to do your homework for you and then you got quizzed on the homework.

You probably don’t remember a great deal about it.

Parents aren’t making you stupid, but not doing the thing that you’ve said you’ve done won’t help you get better at it.

Writing isn’t just the putting of words onto the paper. It’s the whole process: the research, the thinking, the ideas that go into it, the draft of those ideas itself, and then the tinkering with that draft in order to publish it.

‘AI makes you bad at all of it’ really doesn’t sound like the smart take some people think it does.