I'll save you the time of this garbage hot take. He is saying that AI will produce a lot of content...thus leading to time wasted (memes, funny stuff, lame stuff, pictures, etc). that is all. that's the entire article.
Institutions are clearly threatened by this tech as it promises to upend many professional fields and economic relationships. In my case I'm seeing teachers suggest that GPT will ruin education, as though we haven't said the same thing about calculators or the internet or whatever the next thing is for generations.
Like many similar articles in the NYT and WaPo this article is nearly anti-intellectual is it's lack of basic research and curiosity. It's like these people haven't used the thing for even a half hour. But yet they speak with authority on the implications.
That demonstrates fear or gatekeeping. It demonstrates an interest in slowing down the change we are seeing. And it's pretty embarrassing to watch because you can't really hide that agenda when you don't know what you are talking about and are only coming from a place of defending the status quo.
Who buys into this? Who is this for? Who is convinced? They must be talking to people who want this answer and find it comforting. But given that it's not really very insightful or true, and has no shelf life, what's the point?
I really wonder.
Oh, and there are the always-green ones about calculators, and encyclopedias (that changed into wikipedia). Of course there is the famous one from ancient Greece about writing... So, yeah, consider the population dumbed down already.
Socrates in Phaedrus. I searched it with ChatGPT. Could only vaguely remember it and indeed ChatGPT found the passage. Socrates was right...
I guess this one is handcrafted free-range GPT-free 100% authentic human-made and some people may find that important.
Because I gotta tell yeah, whatever you want to believe, if you were one of my students and you were tasked with summarizing this article, you would probably fail the assignment.
AI can help generate text, but reading and comprehension is still something you need to care about as a human, especially if you are trying to help people save time and understand things! Its an honorable intention, but its still something you have to follow through with and do well. Otherwise you are doing more harm than good.
If you're interested, maybe a little direction:
1. What kinds of things does the author identify as "wasting time"? 2. Does the author think wasting time and play are bad things? 3. Does the author in this article think AI is bad?