AI Made Me Dumb

You must have had the same thoughts echoing in your head since Artificial Intelligence became integral to our lives. Before AI, my childhood friend used to call me Professor of English or "IDAN", a slang the Yoruba tribe uses to describe someone who is good at something or a notorious person, depending on the context in which it is used. Why so? Because whenever he needs help with drafting emails, write-ups, etc he seeks my help because of my sheer ability to compose words. This fading ability of mine used to amaze me too because when I read my own write-ups, I ask myself if it was really me who came up with such immaculate write-ups. I had the right words in my arsenal to deploy at any point in time.

Friends and acquaintances would praise me for knowing how to articulate and pen down my thoughts, and these compliments made me feel proud and happy.

But what really made me good at this fading skill of mine? I am sure you are already familiar with the popular recipe for being a good speaker and writer, which is reading a lot of books and writing a lot. Yes! That was exactly what helped me at the time. I read a lot of self-help books and made a lot of posts on my LinkedIn account, which was the outlet I used to share topics related to my career. I was so good at expressing my thoughts in writing to the point that I would craft meaningful nonsense for exam questions I didn't have a correct answer to and still score an A or B grade in such papers.

Then came November 30th, 2022, exactly 3 years and 10 months ago, when Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) announced the launch of ChatGPT on X (formerly called Twitter), and the world never remained the same since that very day. This was the first time the common man could feel the impact of Artificial Intelligence in their day-to-day life. AI had always existed, but was used in niche fields where only experts and researchers could see the benefit, but things took a dramatic turn after the birth of ChatGPT. Through a familiar chat interface, you could send in a prompt, and you get a well-composed response to your prompt. This technology was trained on the entire internet's data, and this means one thing: "INTELLIGENCE".

The AfterMath

The world went into a frenzy. Such technology has never been seen before since the inception of man. People started finding different use cases for this technology, which are as follows;

• Homework and academic assignments

• Writing and rewriting (drafting emails, articles, paraphrasing texts, etc)

• Asking questions and learning new things

• Brainstorming and generating ideas

A task that would take hours and days can now be done in the twinkle of a prompt or series of prompts. Life feels so easy, like a huge burden has been lifted from our shoulders. People of lower skill level started to appear or sound like an expert.

Suddenly, no one needs anyone's help anymore. The friend who usually asked for my help never needed my help anymore because there is a new guy in town who is 200x better at composing words than I ever will. Collaboration in knowledge work started becoming a scarce commodity because everyone has become intelligent overnight.

Life became good, but at a cost. The skill that I had subconsciously built over the years started evaporating because I was no longer using the part of my brain responsible for speech and writing. Writing a complete sentence became a struggle, and my confidence started fading. Any little serious write-up has to be done by AI because I no longer trust my ability. If this sounds like you, you are definitely not alone. Technology has often been touted to make our lives easier, but always at a cost. For every 10 problems technology solves, 10 more problems are created.

What is the way out?

The only solution to this problem is to become an avid reader, write regularly without the help of AI till I am more confident in my writing ability, and have regular conversations without the use of pidgin English (this is another major challenge that deserves a standalone article).

This is not to say AI is bad. In fact, AI has changed my life in good ways I can not begin to itemise in this blog, or else we won't leave here. An example of AI's benefit is the website you are currently reading this blog. Without it, I might never have the time to develop a personal website for myself, not to talk of creating my own personal blog. Even if I did, it would have taken months.

Please pardon any grammatical errors you came across during the course of reading this article. I intentionally decided to leave it unpolished so I can use this article as a reference point to measure my progress. If you identify with this same challenge I am going through, you are not alone, and it would only get better if you start taking the necessary steps.

If you go to this point, thanks for reading my jargon; I really appreciate the attention you spared in this world of short attention spans. You are the real MVP!!!