this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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[–] skye@lemmy.world -1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

all the previous examples of technology improving has a greater benefit to offset the detriment.

Books, for example, did decrease our skill to just retain information; however, the benefit of sharing, storing, and propagating information long after you're gone has proven WAY more useful.

a GPS might have decreased your skill in navigation (although reading abstractised maps of where you are is a trade-off), but it allowed for improvements in travel, a harder time getting lost, enabling rescue operations etc.

genAI so far does have it's uses in fields like medicine, chemistry, any domain where generating by hand is unfeasible. But for the general population, it has been proven to impact cognitive skills, it eroded trust across the board:

  • you have to second guess if someone online is a LLM or a person
  • you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI
  • news and media have become so much easier to impact
  • not to mention, all the climate impact the rapid constructions of data centres does (yes, data centres have existed and have been built before, but not to this pace or scale)
  • and maybe the increasing cases of AI psychosis, with all the varieties of harm people have experienced due to this. etc.

For all of this to be offset, there'd need to be a phenomenal benefit to come out of genAI the way it's used today. I don't think the advent of books, libraries, calculators and GPS have had a combined net loss for everyone, more than AI has.

And for the record, I do believe AI is an useful technology. But that remaining usefulness will only show itself from the shockwave, after the bubble bursts.

[–] Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 hours ago

Some fair points, I agree AI definitely has its harms, I was just arguing against the skill atrophy argument that I see some people arguing for without examining the many other skills they have atrophied.

you have to scrutinise whether or not an art piece is made with or without AI

You don't have to do this, you choose to do this because you think art produced with AI is inherently bad / souless etc. An analogy for this could be drum machines, in most modern music it is very hard to tell whether music is using an actual drummer vs a looped drum sample. This takes away jobs from actual drummers and devalues the skill they worked hard to perfect, and it could be argued that it takes away the soul of the beat.

You could live your life trying to listen only to music that uses an actual drummer and constantly analyze and look for cues in the music to let you know if it's an actual drummer. Or you could just enjoy the art for what it is and move on, the only thing stopping you from enjoying it is your own objections to the production method. It's fine to have those objections, but you can't say that everyone else has to have the same standard as that's just taking away the enjoyment of others.