Are we headed for self-destruction?

 Once more I have managed to miss my last Type M post day, so this time I decided that no matter how busy the summer is and how tired I am by the end of the day, I wouldn't miss my next Wednesday post.  This one will be brief. As a child psychologist, I have posted before about my concern about the erosion of basic thinking skills as we rely more and more heavily on technology. This is especially true of young people whose brains are still developing. In the early years, up to about age 7, the brain is expanding rapidly, making more and more connections to make all kinds of learning possible. After that, however, it begins to concentrate on those connections that are most needed and used, while cutting back on the connections that seem unimportant. It's a use it or lose it era. 

Two fundamental building blocks of cognition are attention and working memory, without which more complex thinking and analysis is impossible. Both have been seriously eroded by technologies providing superficial, rapid-fire stimulation. When was the last time you did mental math, when the calculator on your phone was readily at hand?

I first sounded the alarm when students began to use sources cribbed from the internet to cut and paste a jumble of ideas to produce an essay or project. I worried they would not learn to see the big picture and integrate ideas to see how they were connected. I also worried about the cellphone umbilical cord that tied young people too closely to their parents, so they didn't develop the self-confidence and problem-solving skills that come with doing things on their own. 

With the advent of AI, I am afraid that an entire generation will grow up barely learning to think, or feel, for ourselves at all. Recently, I've read several articles that convey the problem for better than me, and I share two here. They are long but well worth the read (for those of us who can still read for in-depth understanding). There were many more but I can't offhand find the articles. But this is a brief glimpse of the dangers ahead.

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/27/it-wants-users-hooked-and-jonesing-for-their-next-fix-are-young-people-becoming-too-reliant-on-ai

About ChatGPT

 

by Charlotte Hinger

I spoke with a lady Sunday who knows a lot about ChatGPT. I'm fascinated with this new technology and have used it for composition twice and for a query once. 

She advised against using it to write anything because Google and other search engines have already become adept at spotting material that has been generated by AI and will downgrade the blog with its wily algorithm. 

Besides there are some serious lawsuits filed by major players who have the money to affect the usage by ordinary word toilers. 

My source enthusiastically endorsed using ChatGPT in other ways, including solving problems or locating information. 

Here was my query: "Can you devise a marketing plan for a historical novel that will be published by a University Press in July?"

Before I could draw another breath--there it was. And it was perfect! With all the right steps. You bet, I'm going to use it to promote my upcoming historical novel, Mary's Place. 

While all the discussion about AI rages, I'm comforted by a line from Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The Mary Gloster.":

"They copied all they could copy, but they could not copy my mind. So I left them sweating and stealing a full half mile behind."

Scribes to our Robot Overlords

 The previous Type M post from John Corrigan touched upon writing samples from the Artificial Intelligence app, ChaptGPT and its worrisome implications, especially to us writers. I've also seen other examples of what AI can produce as it scrubs the Internet for content in remarkable ways. What really impressed me were its Mid-Century and Art Deco period recreations of Burning Man. However, all was not perfect as like many other amateur artists, AI had difficulty rendering hands. Plus the occasional person was given three legs. Or it could be, AI has already decided that people do need these extra appendages and when it controls the human birthing process in artificial wombs (coming soon to a clinic near you), our children will be the deformed pets of our robot overlords. 

But there are groups who cheer AI's ability to generate content almost instantly. At the 20Books Vegas writing conference, the attitude was that since many of its authors write to market and depend on a prolific output to meet audience demands, the ability for AI to "write" sequels can be leveraged into more books to sell, i.e., more profit. Another group that welcomes AI are Instagram/TikTok influencers, such as models, who also need to produce a continuous stream of content to satisfy their audience and keep the algorithms happy. Many argue that since much of their content is the same--posing in bikinis, etc., why not use AI to make more pictures? 

The ability of AI to mimic reality is both its greatest strength and greatest danger. We're close to seeing credible imitations of people--"deep fakes"--in outlandish video simulations. One app claims it can sample a brief recording of your voice and from that, produce an audio of you saying anything. Couple that with similar video software and your identity as an individual can be at risk. Looking deeper into this dark mirror and acknowledging that the demographic most harmed by social media are adolescent girls, can you imagine the humiliation when an unassuming young woman sees that her image was uploaded into a AI porn app? Whoops, it's already happened.