Reading comprehension, critical thinking and source verification will be much harder than today. This is not filling in blanks. This encourages students to verify and analyze and that is great! It also gives them a framework to understand the limitations of AI so they can more effectively use it.
Your scenario is not a contradiction. We could have a lower level of ability to express ourselves combined with a lot of AI generic content effecting reading comprehension combined with lower-level AIs (because they end up being trained on AI generic content) combined with style being stuck in a certain form and never evolving (because AIs will keep generating new generic content in the same default style).
Deskilling is one of the things that worries me more than AIs 'taking over the world' - more likely we'll eventually hand it to AIs willingly or evolve ourselves somehow.
>This encourages students to verify and analyze and that is great!
Very reasonable, I'm not against this exercise per se. I am wondering where this will lead to.
Without that loss of hand eye coordination that followed the lack of daily hunting there is also no roman empire, no silk road, no pyramids, no three sisters in indegenous agriculture, no man on the moon, no internet and no chatgpt.
Whether we would be sacrificing a skill, or gaining enough productivity for the next leap forward I guess we will have to see.
Also, this type of AI tech is trained from us, and therefore I'm unsure it can reach significant advancement over current human ability (ChatGPT won't create any new writing styles). We may just end up in a local maxima. Compare to Chess engines which could exceed human ability since they had an obviously good optimization criteria: winning games.
So many people here are worried about the essay with in-depth thought. But let's face it: a lot of written content isn't that valuable. A friend of mine had ChatGPT write his goodbye email for him, and the result was a) really good and b) really funny because it just illustrated how interchangeable these emails are.
Another example: at the large consultancy firms (McKinsey etc), they have a large number of "slide monkeys" that consultants can use to have their powerpoint slides made. Of course nobody officially admits to calling them slide monkeys (I mean, what a terrible term), but everyone unofficially does. These "slide monkeys" are basically low-wage support staff in developing nations like India. AI can automate that work.
That might maybe also make us consider whether the slide format is even an efficient one. Right now, slides imply value because of the time required to make them. Once that changes, we might focus our evaluation of value more on how much content they can deliver efficiently to their audience.
So I wonder what it means if/when we let the AIs come up with the ideas and we just correct them. I have no idea what the implications might be.
> The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology, are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions will be.
>> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
>> What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
The end result would be 100% my work as the ML algorithm/brains/whatever would be generating new copy based on my existing copy and my vision and direction for the novel. And I get the final say on the results. Win-Win!