A few weeks ago, I sat with someone while they were applying to college; in an effort to impress the Admissions Dept, they proceeded to write an essay using AI/Chatgpt. As they read it to me out loud, I looked up at them and said how much of that is AI, and how much is it your own words?

To my disappointment, the entire essay was written and produced by CHATgpt. I told them that I could immediately tell the tone and word usage was foreign to their form of communication, and once they had the required personal interview, an astute educator would deduce that as well.

Well, to say this person panicked was an understatement. Their own insecurity or laziness caused them to defer to a computer-generated essay to guarantee they would be considered for the program, giving them a leg up. I told them that I was sincerely disappointed that they would resort to this type of function, knowing full well that they were capable, on their own, of composing an essay that was acceptable. They graduated from a very prestigious university here in Los Angeles and had the skills needed to write their own essay!

It made me very sad to learn that this was available to every student who found themselves in a pickle, be it of time or laziness. They can now resort to a service that can do the work for them, and they are NOT required to think for themselves, which dilutes their own critical thinking.

How can we compete with the world if this is what we are using? I know many arguments favor such functions, but what does that create? A society of non-thinkers. Just recently, an attorney presented his entire argument in court using AI, and thankfully, the Judge was smart enough to know that the cases being cited were not even actual cases but completely made up. That is a product of laziness on the behalf of that litigator.

So you see, the promise of something being better for us and useful is slowly deteriorating the thought process and the ability to communicate effectively. Our sense of independent cognition is being taken away from us as we rely on computers to do the work for us. We run the risk of doctors not truly understanding concepts and theories, educators grading papers written by computers, attorneys citing ineffective laws, research not being binary, books not being written by authors, and so on. You may never even know if this very blog was written by AI!

It saddens me that so much of what we want to improve in this world continues to dilute this world.

I suggest that we resist the mindless, thoughtless idea that we need a machine to think for us, write for us, and cite for us.

Stand up to the idea that we as humans are slowly giving up our viability to something that has no heart and without a heart we die.

Just saying…

BTW, this blog was fully composed by a human!