So fucking crazy how AI is completely stunting people's ability to read, write, talk, etc. All while completely destroying the environment as well.
People aren't gonna be able to function at all if it keeps going like this
We are so dearly screwed
So fucking crazy how AI is completely stunting people's ability to read, write, talk, etc. All while completely destroying the environment as well.
People aren't gonna be able to function at all if it keeps going like this
We are so dearly screwed
It does feel kind of too shocking to be true, but it reminds me of "character amnesia", in Chinese known as 提笔忘字 ("lift the pen, forget the character") and a person suffering from this is known in Japanese as ワープロ馬鹿 (waapurobaka, "word processor idiot"). Character amnesia is an anecdotally well-attested but poorly studied phenomenon of Chinese and Japanese speakers forgetting how to write characters by hand, because they almost always write using IMEs, and almost always read the characters based on their overall shape rather than looking at the details.
So over-reliance on a technology that writes your words for you making you struggle with your own language is something that's happened before, however character amnesia is in writing, which I think is a much less hard-wired skill in our brains compared to speaking.
提笔忘字 is real, but the tibi part at least you know the word and lift your pen, it's just the writing you've forgotten. Kinda same as if I'd forgotten how to spell a word, I still know the word and could say it if I want.
Anecdotally, speaking to people of that age range, and to people who use LLMs regularly (and the intersection of that age who use llms), I haven't noticed any regression or drastic loss of ability to select/recall words in conversation as the tweet describes. That kind of catastrophic failure of remembering basic words sounds like something more serious than a couple of years of using chatGPT can inflict
Exactly, exactly.
also every Chinese language is like 100x more complicated than english so not really a comparison
Chinese isn't that complicated. It's hard to have to memorize thousands of characters, and the use of tones can be difficult to process at first, but their grammar systems are more logical and straightforward than English's.
English is a weird mongrel language, full of borrowed rules and vocabulary, its inconsistency makes it complicated.