not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can’t be true because “everyone” uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is “like the 90s”. girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren’t doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!
Yeah.
It’s so isolating. But the seeds of it were there before.
Before writing essays with LLM prompts, the thing “everyone” did, that they didn’t believe you if you said you didn’t do, was copy an essay from someone else. Or ask someone else to write your essay for you.
I graduated from college in 2005. I did not ever cheat on an essay. I know how many times I cheated on any assignment at all, in my whole school career, because there were only two.
Once in kindergarten, when they left me alone with a test on a subject they knew I struggled with, and the answers to it in a book, and told me not to look in the book. (To this day I am pretty sure this actually was an intentional test of my honesty… in which case, then, I didn’t exactly cheat, just failed. But still felt bad enough about it to remember it ever since.)
And once in junior high school Spanish class, with a substitute teacher who had made the mistake of admitting he didn’t know any Spanish. And a weekly presentation that I always forgot to do, and usually improvised with pretty successful genuine results, but this time I improvised it with complete nonsense, because I had just realized I could. (I did not feel all that bad about this, because it was hilarious. But it was still far enough outside my usual behavior that I remembered it forever.)
(Dishonorable mentions that weren’t exactly cheating, but still somewhat felt like it: A few times I re-used essays I’d written for a previous class, when a new assignment in another class had parameters that the previous essay also worked for. Sometimes this involved translating into another language, though, so it wasn’t 100% lazy.)
Anyway. I say this not to brag about my honesty… but to point out that this level of “not doing the thing everyone does” has pretty much zero advantageous effect on one’s life. My honesty has gotten me absolutely nowhere that my pre-existing level of societal privilege wouldn’t have gotten me anyway (and much farther if I’d been more willing to cheat).
People who lack any ability to read and comprehend an email, or write or say anything that has any meaning at all, or absorb any new information they didn’t already believe or want to believe, are my bosses now. The skill that got them where they are is composed in equal parts of bullshit and confidence in the bullshit.
If people en masse are going to stop doing whatever’s easiest, society is going to have to change to stop rewarding that and punishing everything else. And in the past 40 years I’ve seen no sign that that’s ever going to happen.