ChatGPT has destroyed your ability to speak, write and express your views.
Its been a few years since the launch of ChatGPT. Since then people have used it to write emails, social media posts, college essays, assignments, homework, script writing and what not. One after another, new Large Language Models (LLMs) where released with better capabilites by different companies. People made courses on ‘ how to use ChatGPT to write your script’, ‘How to generate ideas for your next Youtube Video with ChatGPT’, ‘How to plan your XYZ event with ChatGPT’, ‘ I let AI control my day’, ‘ ChatGPT helps me to pick what outfit should I wear for my casual day out’…….
This boom in the usage of AI for everyday tasks led to the outsourcing of your own thinking capabilities. For example,. I need to send an email, i will put in a prompt mentioning the appropriate tone and copy paste it. I need to put a caption to my video, I will let AI write it by giving description of the video in incomplete phrases and broken sentences. I need to learn about bees, cool, I will ask ChatGPT to give me all the information about their behaviour, different species and fun facts in 3 paragraphs. I want to reduce/increase the word count of my essay, i will input my whole document to AI, and prompt it to do the work without changing the core idea of the essay. I want to check for grammatical mistakes because english is not my first language, I will just give AI to do it and ask it to correct the sentences. I want to do a comparative study about xyz topic, i will ask ChatGPT to do it and present me the information neatly in points. I want to know the working of lithium batteries, i will just ask ChatGPT to explain to me like explaining to a 10 year old. I don’t have time to cover all my study material on the night before exam, I will input all my notes and ask AI to summarize the core concepts without missing any important points. I need some cools names for my insta user profile, I will ask AI to generate 10 funky names. I need to talk to someone about this issue but everyone is busy so i will just ask ChatGPT about it.
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The list goes on and on and on. Some of these were really smart uses of time and resources given the circumstance, but let’s face the fact, many of these were not. And they have destroyed our ability to express our views with our own words in complete sentences. The irony was when we started to prompt LLMs to sound more like humans. Don’t use em dashes. Delete the certain words because no one uses them in normal language. The same length of sentences will indicate AI usage so break your sentences into chunks. Use the “GPTHumanizer AI” tool to convert your AI essay to different words to avoid being detected as AI by another AI. Peak Irony.
The brain rot from this has been very real. Giving my own example, I used to write 500+ words essay in under hour given a topic i know about. In that hour i would be able to formulate my points, organize my arguments, present the facts and conclusion in a logical manner. Now I cannot write an email inquiring about something from the student affairs office. On top of that I worry that if my tone in the email is polite and formal enough. Another example from me, I used to solve integrals by hand in record time and memorize 6 page essays in a language another than my mother tongue in like 2.5 hours. Now i have look twice and thrice at the same sentence to ensure I have got it right just while writing something.
First I thought this was only me. Maybe i have been relying on these tools too much. But now i see other people talking about this too. I saw an influencer telling how she was unable to form complete senteces to express herself. When she speaks, she is unable to find words, like there was a glitch and she just got stuck and cannot speak further. The other day I saw a LinkedIn post from this software engineer telling how Claude code has ruined his ability to write code by hand. All he does is prompt and enter and copy and paste.
It is no lie that outsourcing so much of our daily tasks to an algorithm/prediction machine has ruined our ability to think, form, rationalize and express our views. And I won’t be surprised when in a few years we will be seeing studies on this topic telling how much our brains have shrunk or how much dumb we have become over time.
Even writing this article has taken me more time than expected. And I was very much tempted to put in my broken phrases and ideas into GPT to ‘organize my thoughts into a essay for me’. But here I am, presenting to you my original thoughts written(after much struggling) without any AI.
