This article seems a bit lazy and not up to par with the usual content of The Free Press. The idea that we haven’t been living in “moving history” is false. Countless examples in the last fifty years but for the sake of argument I will focus on one—the internet that fueled social media. Social media has reshaped both the American (and mo…
This article seems a bit lazy and not up to par with the usual content of The Free Press. The idea that we haven’t been living in “moving history” is false. Countless examples in the last fifty years but for the sake of argument I will focus on one—the internet that fueled social media. Social media has reshaped both the American (and most of the modern world’s) political landscape and life. I would argue it has allowed for extreme and radical ideas to be given to the masses much like the printing press. It has also brought great things to the world—access to information, immediate communication and small businesses access to new markets to name a few. It has also come with terrible consequences to each of those. My concerns with AI are rooted in my profession, a high school American history teacher. It is the lense that I tend to see most things through. Over the past 15 years, social media has wrecked our younger generations. Sadly, I have had a front row seat to watch it happen. Many of us watched the shift in our high school students. They have become lazy with information. They see no reason to read when you can Google. They don’t know how to sift through the vast amount of information that is available to them and decipher what is true and what is garbage. I can see the temptation that AI, used well, could give them only the good and true. But what if it doesn’t (we have already seen bias in chatGPT). It also has already shown us that it can recreate voices, images, videos that look real. What effect will this have on elections? What about criminal cases? What about my students who already doubt everything they see? The ball is already rolling, I get that. But the overly optimistic approach has never faired well in history.
This article seems a bit lazy and not up to par with the usual content of The Free Press. The idea that we haven’t been living in “moving history” is false. Countless examples in the last fifty years but for the sake of argument I will focus on one—the internet that fueled social media. Social media has reshaped both the American (and most of the modern world’s) political landscape and life. I would argue it has allowed for extreme and radical ideas to be given to the masses much like the printing press. It has also brought great things to the world—access to information, immediate communication and small businesses access to new markets to name a few. It has also come with terrible consequences to each of those. My concerns with AI are rooted in my profession, a high school American history teacher. It is the lense that I tend to see most things through. Over the past 15 years, social media has wrecked our younger generations. Sadly, I have had a front row seat to watch it happen. Many of us watched the shift in our high school students. They have become lazy with information. They see no reason to read when you can Google. They don’t know how to sift through the vast amount of information that is available to them and decipher what is true and what is garbage. I can see the temptation that AI, used well, could give them only the good and true. But what if it doesn’t (we have already seen bias in chatGPT). It also has already shown us that it can recreate voices, images, videos that look real. What effect will this have on elections? What about criminal cases? What about my students who already doubt everything they see? The ball is already rolling, I get that. But the overly optimistic approach has never faired well in history.
Preach! I’ll turn the pages!!!