Written by Human Hands
I had another topic related to garment making written on my list but just have too much else on my mind today. Today, I have spent a lot of time thinking about words, thinking, reading, speaking, and information. My husband and I have had several conversations in the past month or so about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Someone called early this morning describing how they had been using Chat GPT lately. Right after that, I saw a post on Instagram that covered a lot of ground, talking about AI and about how we are being “dumbed down” as a society in a variety of ways.
The IG post mentioned a couple of older science fiction books, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” published in 1953 and George Orwell’s “1984,” published in 1949. In the Bradbury story, books are simplified into summaries that can be read in five minutes. The result is that with people no longer reading books, they eventually forget how to think. In the Orwell story, the government, “big brother,” controls the words that are allowed to be used, eliminating all but the simplest of words. The result is that people are no longer able to express complex concepts and thoughts, and eventually stop having complex thoughts. People who think for themselves are much harder to control. The fictitious governments in these books wanted to control people easily, so they worked at dumbing people down.
The sad part is that 70-ish years after these dystopian science fiction stories were written, the government does not have to work to dumb us down—we, as a society, are doing it voluntarily. Let me be clear, I am not pointing the finger at everyone else because I drag myself out of this pit daily, at a minimum. It is so very easy to succumb to temptations of the little devices nearly all of us carry around all the time.
I am not opposed to technology, the internet, cell phones, AI, etc., I just think we have to be careful to handle all of them with caution and view them as tools. Twenty-five years ago, I was trying to hammer into my students’ heads that they could not use Google searches as sources for academic papers, but instead had to use verified sources—books and scientific journal articles, for example. Now, we have AI supposedly having digested all the world’s information and summarizing everything for us. The same IG post I mentioned earlier pointed out that AI is beginning to ‘hallucinate’ sources and citations and even the people in charge of the various AI engines have no clue how or why this is happening. The point is that I think it is fine to use AI to start to hone in on the information you seek, but you still need to keep your own brain active and engaged. I have always been a “trust but verify” sort of person anyway, and you can believe I am applying that to all the AI helpers that are appearing everywhere these days.
Now, I am off to do something else productive, I hope. First, I aim to look at the Libby app to see if I can borrow those two books from the library and download them to my Kindle, but in order to do that, I have to remember to ignore those other tempting social media, dead-heading apps. Wish me luck!