But AI is not actually reading or knowing anything. It recombines patterns. It doesn’t actually know or understand anything. If you want it to summarise Kant, it simply searches and rehashes other people’s summaries of Kant. It has no actual understanding of the original text. It’s not thought, and it’s not a real mind. It’s just a simulation of it - plausible linguistic patterns.
I think it’s actually quite possible that real skills and real knowledge disciplines, especially niche ones that take a long time to learn, get crowded out by AI slop, like an academic version of dead internet theory. It will most certainly be used as a way of defunding large parts of the university and academia, getting rid of entire disciplines, and deskilling large parts of the general workforce.
Only in the last decade all the talk was of upskilling and the knowledge economy. Today, the likely future looks more like the past: a very few people in an elite who siphon off the profits from AI; and a population who are systematically deskilled into “meat suit” manual and low-skill jobs, which can be paid very little but provide a convenient labour source for the elite. Goodbye to the Enlightenment, the era of mass higher education, culture and any ideals beyond a crude commercialism. Hello to the corporate drone world where AI produces endless tasteless fake slop for other bots to consume, while our kids are all told that plumbing and being healthcare assistants following AI commands are the only jobs out there, because anything else is simply programmed up by an LLM instead of a person.
We’d do well to resist the creeping tyranny of AI slop while we can, or it will render large parts of the internet unusable, and every bit of general life ugly, nonsensical and commercial.