AI-powered moronization of the masses

Within a few decades after Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440, the tool was commercialized to distribute information at scale.

Newspapers, magazines, documents, books, etc., started being produced, replicated, stored, shared, and created at unprecedented numbers. The printing press gave us many positive and negative things.

The positives are obvious: more people are now educated and aware about the general affairs of life, and in comparison to the public a millennium ago, are more capable.

However, the negatives were there too. It became easier for the powerful and the rich, AKA the ruling class, to use the printing press to shape the minds of the masses.

Over time, radio, television, and now the internet have been more or less serving the same purpose. They have all empowered the individual while taking a toll on the collective.

People are dumber, have fewer original thoughts, depleted attention spans, absent creativity, and have emotional dependencies today than they did a couple of centuries ago, albeit they were poorer and had shittier lives.

And now, the continuous process of moronization of the masses is at its highest after a certain company by the name of OpenAI released a product ChatGPT back in October 2022.

The elimination of cognitive effort

Putting two and two together.

With the internet, at least people reached their own conclusions to a certain degree, even though the recommendation algorithms fed them personalized information that already aligns with their biases.

AI has kicked this up a notch because bias is a feature, not a bug. Tools like Gemini, Claude, etc., are designed to keep on learning from your behaviour, so you will be happy and satisfied with the responses.

In a way, it’s great if you use AI at work. You want the LLM or any kind of generative tool to produce output that matches your expectations.

However, if you use it for anything personal or significant, you will get fucked.

People are already using AI for mental health, career advice, fitness tips, relationship counselling, companionship, financial guidance, and more. If you want to make progress in any of these areas, the last thing you need is a yes-man who justifies your existing perspectives.

In fact, you need to be challenged. Someone should tell you things that you don’t know, even though they disagree with what you’ve been believing. Then, you need to get uncomfortable and learn the new bits to improve your life down the line.

AI has taken over that cognitive process of “figuring things out.”

The end of content writing

I have perhaps one of the best examples to prove how AI is accelerating the moronization of the masses.

For the past six years, I’ve been working as a marketing content writer. My goal is to write articles and web copy that caters to a particular audience’s pain points or needs to promote a company’s products or services.

Before AI, I felt like I did meaningful work because I had to type in the words. I had to dig deep by going through online web content, including YouTube videos, to get educated about a thing. 

Then, I presented information that is contextually relevant to the topic at hand from the brand’s perspective. Yes, SEO was a part of it, as it should be in digital marketing.

After a few years of AI, everything has changed in content marketing. More often than not, it is running a templated workflow, and the writer’s job at each stage is to polish AI’s output.

For example, AI will generate topic ideas, you will just pick the right ones, and tweak them as needed. The same applies to outlining, drafting, and editing. 

The AI-generated, human-enhanced output will be fed to the machines, and the cycle repeats.

The actual work of doing research to build an opinion that is used to frame and support a narrative is lost. 

From a purely professional and commercial standpoint, I don’t mind it. My productivity has increased, although I am still getting used to the new approach toward marketing content writing.

It will take me a couple more months at least to muscle-memorize this process, but it does make sense because marketing demands “good enough.”

At the same time, writing is thinking, and the next generation of writers is growing up without it. 

Post-GPT writers will struggle massively without AI. They won’t be able to produce dope, relatable articles like this one because they’ve not been accustomed to thinking on their own.

They are dependent on AI for critical thinking and lack directional cognitive skills that require a tinge of creativity.

Borrowing perceived intelligence

Many moons ago, when I was writing my book on content writing with AI, I mentioned that only experts can use AI to produce useful content pieces while saving resources.

That’s because noobs, especially writers and marketers who started their careers after AI was widely available, can’t look at AI-written copy and say “that’s shit.” It requires years of expertise and, frankly, the mastery of the art of writing.

This is because AI is fundamentally incapable of doing such a thing. 

In the 100-page ML book by Andriy Burkov, the author explains that “machines can’t learn, and hence, machine learning is a misnomer.”

Basically, a lot of data points are collated to build a dataset, and on that dataset, a statistical method is applied to build a model. That model predicts. All of the models are wrong, but some are useful.

AI interprets everything, including the data that’s used to train it to your prompts, as a bunch of characters. It is using unfathomable levels of computing power to find patterns between them to produce a bunch of characters that you may find useful. It doesn’t “understand” anything.

Unfortunately, the upper management in businesses and the top decision-makers in corporations don’t know this well enough. They are living quarter-by-quarter and are just concerned with reporting numbers that will keep their shareholders happy.

While it is working amazingly for their bonuses and the net valuations of the companies in the short term, it will have a huge impact in the long term.

Sycophancy and accelerated moronization of knowledge workers

Ask ChatGPT if a retarded recipe for cake, like using a pint of hard liquor and minced chicken on the frosting, will be any good. Chances are, it will tell you that it “can” be a great recipe.

In reality, such a cake will be inedible. The AI will simply agree with your stupid ideas because it’s been trained to do so. This is sycophancy.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen many humans think they are brilliant because they have social media followers. Now, you can add “LLM sycophancy” to the list. And it’s significantly worse.

You see, you can dismiss social-media-famous people due to their stupidity and absence of character. 

It will be much harder to do the same to a C-suite executive who thinks their idea about product development or content marketing (something they’ve never done in their life) is perfect.

I am already seeing this in my field. Plenty of decision-makers in companies are publishing trash content because dumb cunts who produce the AI slop think it’s beautiful. They are incapable of learning that emotional impact is what moves a reader to click on the “purchase” button, which the AI models can’t produce.

The outcome is more comical than anything. The blog posts and social media content of the majority of companies are a variation of “cheap and better.” Everyone is repurposing the same content format and structure, trying to stand out.

Ironically, the thing that would make them stand out, that is, independent thought, is being discouraged by treating AI’s content and recommendations as better than a human expert’s.

I’ve personally experienced it. Editors will run my human-written draft through AI models to get “improvement tips” and tell me to make those changes. As a seasoned writer, I know that making those changes will butcher the article, but hey, if the client’s happy and they are paying me, who cares?

The future of knowledge work

Right now, most of the companies are more keen on investing in AI and LLMs rather than people. In a few years, there will be top-of-the-line technologies that everyone just “kind of” gets to do passable work.

Experts across white-collar fields are getting laid off or are facing salary cuts to stay afloat during the manufactured recession. Eventually, there will be no experts, and the overall quality of work across creative and engineering fields in the IT sector will deplete.

And then, there will be proper investment again in people because someone needs to work hard to make these billionaires some money, and it sure ain’t going to be AI.

Or, the white-collar industries will undergo massive reductions in headcount. Many will leave because they will despise the field, and others will be forced out. The only ones who are left are pretentious morons who don’t know what to do but believe they are the best.

Until next time,

Tara

AI taking over critical thinking (source: India Today)