The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever - eviltoast
  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    18 hours ago

    It is so weird seeing these stories and trying to make sense of what it means for the future of humans using written communication.

    I’ve heard stories from some of the youth that they see no reason why not to use genAI to save time and effort.

    But it’s not like using a spell check, it’s like asking someone else to do the thinking for you.

    And the only reason we have genAI is because it ingested oodles of real people’s creative output made before genAI was created.

    “Why do you want to take the class?” --If you can’t be honest in how you answer, why should you get to take the class? On the other hand, if it’s not important to be able to write about it, why ask them to spend time on that assignment?

    I get that step 1 is to stop assigning any homework that is drudgery. But they can’t all be replaced by oral reports, or in-class writing assignments, can they? Are teachers going to start asking for assignments to be handwritten, so it’s at least not so easy to copy and paste?

    If education is for teaching kids how to think, and (I suppose) interact with emerging technologies, how do you teach people to think and write for themselves?

    Or is the answer that with LLMs being so good at generating plausible text, people of the future won’t need to be good at the writing process, and the skill of writing will decline?

    I mean, once we had texting and the internet, people wrote a lot fewer letters. It’s something of a disappearing art.

    Maybe good writing just goes away?