Stronger Than You

dear god please kill whatever this shit is

THIS THING IS STILL AROUND???? isnt it illegal??

kokobot is a (conditionally) HIPAA-breaking chatgpt data harvester that is owned by AirBNB and that i genuinely thought had been fully exposed and expunged years ago. it's that bad

nothing has made me feel like an ancient grumpy crone more than the “using chatgpt for school is fine actually” sentiment among youths

if you use chatgpt to write your english assignments that is bad. you should not do that

this has been accelerated by watching my roommate who teaches freshmen composition slowly become ben_affleck_smoking.jpg as he has to fail multiple students every semester for using chatgpt

like. this is bad and this person should feel bad lol this completely misses the point of writing assignments. the point is the production, not the end product

critical thinking is a genuinely important life skill, whether or not you pursue higher education. fascism relies on anti-intellectualism!

AND IT’S TERRIBLE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. what are we doing here

Whenever our class would harass our teachers about why we have to learn X thing —why do I need to take precalc, why do I need to take an English class —it’s because you’re not just learning the material, you’re learning how to think.

That’s actually incredibly sad.

Every generation has been more tech literate than the one preceding it, but we seem to have finally hit a turning point where the kids are getting worse. Not dumber, just worse. And it isn't entirely their fault...

At some point circa 2000-2010, tech literacy peaked among schoolchildren as computers and operating systems were getting refined, but were just annoying and rough enough that in order to use them properly you had to really understand *how* to use a computer. You had to troubleshoot.

But then those rough edges got smoothed out. At some point, applications became apps. The majority of kids whose families couldn't afford their own laptops found accessibility in the cheaper, more streamlined Chromebooks - computers which trade out the robust operating systems of a PC/Mac for being a glorified web browser machine to save costs. Slowly, in the name of accessibility and sales, quality of life improvements overtook the entire process of using a computer, and, by extension, how students interact with the internet. The skills to search slowly became less necessary as everything consolidated to a handful of websites. Google started shifting from showing specific query-driven results to using incomprehensible algorithms to show you what they think you want to see. To a gross extension of this comes ChatGPT and AI.

And so these are the tools they learn with, and thus the reason to really hone one's skills in using those tools died out as everything starts to kinda be done for you. When I was a kid in that era, if I wanted to play a game over the Internet with a friend, we had to do some extensive research on how to connect in real-time to sync up our games and get it to work. Now, though? It Just Works™

If you want to do research on a given topic, you could spend time trolling through articles and looking up citation formats for a paper. Now, you just ask the magic technology prompt to clean it up for you. It's easy, it's convenient for everybody, but the real trick is that it means you're disincentivized from ever really going beyond that and figuring out how all of the pieces come together.

Accessibility is a *good* thing, for the record; the more people who can use a tool, the better off we all are as a whole, after all. The key lesson however is in how the tools are taught. Computer classes, typing classes, and general Internet safety lectures have been getting phased out from curriculum while predatory data gathering has skyrocketed. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I know a solution, but I am wanting to note that while these kids seem doomed, it's not entirely their own fault. If anything, blame capitalism for dumbing everything down to the lowest common consumer.

/rant