Is AI Making Us Smarter or Stupider?

Hey Reader, 

It’s 12:37 a.m. on October 14th. I was chilling and wondering if my last post "What Would You Do If Your Friend Made You Feel Small?" has the right title. Then I realized that it has a colon, which I’ve learned is a sign of an AI-generated title. I panicked a bit because I didn’t want my post to sound like “AI-written”. I decided to change it to a more SEO-friendly title — a question which is the basis of the post anyway. Oops, there’s an em dash!

I had also learned one early morning, while I was hurkle-durkling in bed, that people now believe a post with an em dash was written by AI! Oh my! What an invention AI has brought to the world of writing! I could have sworn writers have been using an em dash since time immemorial, long before humans created Artificial intelligence. 

I mean, I thought punctuation marks have always existed, but oh well!

I think there's been a lot of debate about whether AI is good or bad. I never even knew how popular ChatGPT was, and how almost everyone uses it. I first downloaded it earlier this year. I wrote a post on "Femininity" and asked it to proofread it. Then it changed my entire write-up.

What’s cr@zy is that I actually published that post without reading through it. One of my friends who reads my blog read it and told me, “Moxie, this sounds generic with no actual data.” I was like, “What do you mean? I didn’t generalize.” Then he pointed out where I did. I went back to that post and realized my entire voice was gone except for the beginning. I had to rewrite it! 

After getting familiar with ChatGPT, I realized that it has an easy-to-spot pattern. Honestly, when I see a post "entirely" written by ChatGPT, I don’t get to finish it because I’m looking at it like, “I’m reading this to understand your mind and your thoughts, not AI’s.”

You see, I don’t have a problem with Artificial Intelligence, and the answer to the question I used as this post's title depends on how you think. AI can help your creativity, and it can also k!ll it. 

I don’t subscribe to calling people out for using AI. Asking people not to use AI at all is like saying, “Don’t buy a car; it’ll make you lazy. Walk instead.”

Where I have a problem with using AI is when you’re misleading people with it especially when you're rendering people your service(s). For example, let’s say you have a skincare business and you use AI to polish your skin to look flawless, even though in reality it doesn’t look like that. The issue is that you're deceiving people into buying your products by making them believe their skin will look like what you’re showing them, which is obviously false advertising.

I can ask an AI assistant to create thumbnails for my posts with instructions on what I want, or I can always go on Canva to create those images, but which one do you think saves me more time, especially if I have something else to do?

If someone takes a picture and uses AI to make it clearer, does that suddenly mean AI created the picture? Of course not. The picture was already there. AI only helped improve its quality. I think there’s a difference between using AI to create something and using it to make something you’ve already created better. It’s like a photographer taking pictures and improving their clarity.

However, editing your pictures with AI assistants can get your picture flagged as a f@ke AI-generated image because these tools embed metadata in your pictures. Do it anyway, if that's what you want to do!

I honestly wonder what will happen if we get so used to seeing perfectly AI-generated content that we start treating genuine human creativity as something suspicious.

Imagine spending hours writing something, and someone says, "I think AI wrote this", simply because your sentences are too well constructed. What are writers supposed to start doing now? Deliberately make grammatical mistakes to prove their writing is human?

Anyway, back to the question in my title, "Is AI making us smarter or stupider?" I think the answer depends largely on the person using it.

Here is a vivid example: Imagine two people using ChatGPT.

The first person asks a question, gets an answer, and starts thinking about it. Perhaps something doesn't make sense in the answer, so they ask another question. They might even disagree with the response and decide to do some research of their own.

Before you know it, they've spent a reasonable amount of time learning about something they probably wouldn't have bothered researching in the first place.

Now, imagine another person who asks ChatGPT a question and accepts whatever answer it gives them. No questions, no curiosity, no attempt to even know if the answer is true or not. They just copy it, or assimilate it, and move on.

Tomorrow, they do the same thing, and the day after that as well. Eventually, they might get so used to having answers handed to them that they barely bother thinking for themselves anymore.

Would you say these two people are using AI in the same way? Or one person is learning with it, while the other person is allowing it to do the thinking for them?

Ps, I think ChatGPT was trained to people please and give you the satisfaction you're craving for when you ask a question, so keep that in mind.

In conclusion, AI can k!ll your creativity and make you intellectually lazy. It can also make you smarter. It all depends on you!

As usual, let me know what you think.

Xo, Moxie!

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