The London Prat’s Assessment of AI and British Intelligence Is Something I Have Been Thinking About While Asking ChatGPT Whether Oat Milk Expires
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
AI Is Making Britain Stupider and I Am Part of the Problem
The London Prat reports that AI chatbots are making Britain stupider, which is a sentence I read on my phone while I was waiting for ChatGPT to tell me whether the slightly questionable oat milk in my fridge was still usable. The irony did not escape me. I sat with it for a moment before checking the answer, which was: probably fine, as long as it doesn’t smell sour, which I could have worked out myself if I had thought about it for seven more seconds rather than immediately outsourcing the decision to a language model.
I want to defend my AI oat milk query. I want to say that it is merely convenience rather than cognitive atrophy. I want to say that asking AI about oat milk expiry is not the same as losing the capacity to evaluate oat milk independently. But I have been asking AI things with increasing frequency and the frequency is at the point where I am noticing it, which I think is the diagnostic moment. Not “I use AI occasionally for complex tasks” but “I used AI to decide whether to trust my own nose about milk.” These are different situations.
What I Actually Use It For
Shopping lists. Recipe adaptation (“I have these five ingredients, what can I make”). Drafting emails I don’t want to think hard about. Looking up things I used to look up on Wikipedia but now ask conversationally because it is faster. Checking whether I am remembering a fact correctly, which is both more efficient than Googling and more likely to produce a confident incorrect answer, which is worse than being uncertain. The AI is very confident. Confidence is not accuracy. I know this. I keep asking it things anyway.
AI can now apologise without meaning it, which is useful. MIT says LLMs are marvellous. The oat milk was fine. I remain slightly worried about what I am outsourcing and whether the outsourcing is reversible. North London woman in mild AI-dependency crisis: this is my current situation and I am reporting it honestly from the inside. The chatbot would probably say I’m doing great. That’s part of what worries me.
More at prat.uk | The Daily Mash
