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Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Technology
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It sounds like you are talking about use in education then, which is a different issue altogether.
You can and should set your AI to push back against poor reasoning and unsupported claims. They arnt very smart, but they will try.
I mean it's the same use; it's all literacy. It's about how much you depend on it and don't use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can't read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.
The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn't built for that. It doesn't have "knowledge" or "reasoning" at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.
Is that any worse than people getting their world view from a talking head on 24 news, five second video clips on their phone, or a self curated selection of rage bait propaganda online? The mental decline of humanity is perpetual and overstated.
One bad thing doesn't make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.
And I don't know that it's overstated and it's not at all perpetual. Look at... everything these days. People "disagree" with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.
It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.
That would be great, but I just don't see it happening. The way things are going well be lucky to have a Department of Education in a few years, and public schools might be following right behind. Even if everything turns around tomorrow, all the resources in the world wont get everyone to the level you are aiming at. There are people out there who do not see any value in literacy and there are people who don't have the brain power. You could assign full time private tutors to follow them around and try to teach them things for their whole lives and you'd barely get anywhere. That's just something well have to live with. There's never been a society where everyone was intellectually active, its always been a more or less influential minority. If you want to improve society the best approach making the intellectual voice more influential, not trying to educate the gleefully ignorant.