Is Chat GPT Gonna Make Us Dumber?

Have you found yourself musing lately on whether our increasing reliance on tools like Chat GPT are leading us toward being characters in the movie Idiocracy? It's the kind of thought that makes you stop in your tracks. We ask this AI model to spit out text for us, we use it to answer our questions, compose our emails, and some people are even writing entire novels (although current limitations mean this needs to be done in discrete chunks).

At times, it can seem as if we're training ourselves to parrot back the same blocks of text that this model and others like it are constantly producing. Or is the model training us?

But before we start envisaging a future where our conversational skills are reduced to AI-generated soundbites, let's add some nuance to this narrative. There's always more to the story when it comes to technology. Just like when we transitioned from a purely oral culture to a written one, we're now outsourcing some aspects of our memory and creativity to these models…