I’ve been working with so many students who turn to it as a first resort for everything. The second a problem stumps them, it’s AI. The first source for research is AI.
It’s not even about the tech, there’s just something about not wanting to learn that deeply upsets me. It’s not really something I can understand. There is no reason to avoid getting better at writing.
I don’t know how to solve your core problem you are hinting at without society at large realizing many of our problems are the brainwashing of the masses. This problem is why we initially were taught math without calculators in my day, by college they were expected to help with simple math to focus on the more complicated problems.
Here with llms it’s important to still write, learn to research something (even more than the don’t use encyclopedias as a primary source) learning to read with deep understanding and learning to skim. Learning math and logic is as important as ever.
What I see missing quite a bit in the antiai art world is the importance of creating art to convey your meaning (if AI is a tool involved or not for writing images ect is this thing showing the meaning and nuance you want not just a off the top of your head comment and auto ship the slop output) and the only way you can go no that’s not what I want is to have some idea how to make the piece of writing or art yourself even at a high level.
I personally like the tech but see it accelerating the brain drain for those that rely on it too for answers as the learn.
Yeah, that’s the way I came up too. But I disagree with the “maths without calculators” approach - mainly because it feels like a brute-force solution that ignores the reality that calculators exist.
So does ChatGPT.
We should learn to use the tools we have, not pretend they aren’t there.
More importantly, using something like “do the maths the long way” as a proxy for teaching reasoning probably has limited transfer if it’s not framed explicitly. Like you, I learned a lot of logic through algebra - but no one ever connected those dots. I only realized years later that the real lesson was about reasoning, not just manipulating symbols.
What I’m getting at is:
If we actually care about developing thinkers, we probably need to teach reasoning, skepticism, and how to interrogate outputs directly, including outputs from tools like AI.
The importance of creating art is to convey your feeling. Conveying your meaning is a nice addition if you like that. How does ai convey its feeling?
Another thing we will lose to ai along with the ability/desire to learn.
So a few things : 1 - what is art to the viewer, honestly you can hand craft slop and I don’t want to see it, here it’s the meaning you get the story you the viewer make from it 2 - AI art is bad in two ways in my experience, the story (ie see one) has something critically wrong from the human world, and two most tools today don’t listen to the prompt so no matter how much writting is fed in the result is limited. But if you use it as a tool yes it can make some backgrounds and clip art… The problem is most consumer systems don’t have a good way to put this into a proper editor to finalize a meaningful image… IE put the human story into the final thing.
But the real point isn’t you made some clipart with image get or a paragraph in your story it’s why it didn’t fit in, contradictions it shows and do you the human know how to fix it? Is there tooling you can direct the llm to do better? (For images there really is not it is not good at partial edits in my experience… Easier to have it generate all parts on their own and layer the final product otherwise something will be wrong)