I have lived my entire life mindlessly typing without a care for grammar nor simple spelling, because I knew I had a digital assistant to clean up after me. However, sometime in the middle of last year, and in the midst of my ignorance, I scrolled upon an article by the Wall Street Journal asserting that our attention spans are shortening due to TikTok. What a surprise. Then, sliding down an abyss of articles, I read another disorienting piece in The New York Times, written by guest writer, the renowned linguist and philosopher, Noam Chomsky. He expressed his fear that our implementations of AI will “degrade our science and ethics because of technology’s fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.” His words helped us recognize that what started decades ago as a seemingly harmless spell-corrector, has now morphed into the irresistible legion of chatbots that leave it up to us to figure out when and how to use them. 

In the late 1950s, Artificial intelligence (AI) began by creating a “thinking machine” to “provide human-like interactions with software”--- the words “machine” and “human,” already contradicting each other. Thanks to the dizzying array of AI, any endeavor, from simple spelling to masterminding global advertisements, can now be accomplished within minutes. When we rely on AI to solve manageable language processing problems for us quickly, our brains… dumb down, resulting in our dilemma of the millennium. Is there still hope for us then? 

With AI’s rocket launch in the 21st century, a bundle of predicaments followed: dwindling of jobs, academic integrity, and threats to user privacy and national security. Some even harbor fear of AI taking over the world. While those worries hold value, they should not occupy the center of our attention. The real problem lies in the AI-fueled human desire for things to be at maximum convenience and efficiency, causing harm to our attention spans. As we live in the Information Age, to quote Lucas Martin from Harvard University, “The human attention span has decreased because we now have more and better choices for entertainment.” This is not new information; our attention spans have shortened because we simply lack the patience to do things without the aid of AI. If we do not see or are not given what we are searching for, it is deemed a waste of time rather than a lesson learned.

For the past 30 years, every single person has increasingly depended on natural language processors (NLPs), likely without knowing what they truly are. Amazon Alexa, autocorrect, Apple’s Siri, autofill, and online translation, to name a few, are all NLPs. We have all scrambled to correct the red lines under our text without ever knowing why they were there in the first place, and often feel compelled to ask,  “Hey, Siri, what is thirty-four minus twenty-nine? How do you spell necessary?” We’ve all done that, and it’s okay…until it isn’t. 

People observe, a stitch in time saves nine. In 2009, an article in The New Yorker spotlighted a 20-year study conducted between 1988 and 2008, which revealed the ultimate deterioration of spelling proficiency, and a rise in word-related mistakes specifically in undergraduate papers. These results worsened as a result of the first version of autocorrect, released by Microsoft in 1993.  An article from the University of British Columbia states, autocorrect provides “a barrier to learning to spell… as you do not have the opportunity to review your word and identify any mistakes.” In turn, students, undergraduate students struggle to type without the help of AI software correcting every other word, punctuation, or sentence.

Soon after this revelation, like the writing on the proverbial wall, in November 2022, the news that OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT upon the world ambushed us like cookie settings on a website. Our brains never form neural connections for us to learn when we use autocorrect, so how could we learn when we use ChatGPT? We now have students who know how to enter prompts more so than engage in the creative act of research. This is coming from students, including myself, who have entered prompts, and seen firsthand how effective ChatGPT can be when used right. 

In short, AI is quite literally putting words into our mouths.

I found it fitting for this essay, to ask the star of the show, ChatGPT, what it thought of itself in relation to human intelligence. I asked, “In what ways could ChatGPT make humans intellectually lazy?” It responded with the following. 

“While ChatGPT has numerous benefits as an AI language model, it also has the potential to make humans intellectually lazy in various ways….” The first consequence it listed was obvious, over-reliance on AI. The second consequence listed caused more alarm.

“Reduced creativity: The ease of obtaining information and generated content from ChatGPT may discourage users from coming up with their own ideas, leading to a decline in creative thinking and innovation.”  

In a related interview with The New York Times, Mr. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, insisted that ChatGPT will “figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.” Yet, his beloved chatbot is admitting that increasing usage and dependance of NLPs lead to decreased human creativity. Historically humans struggle with powerful tools, like nuclear energy. So, how does Mr. Altman expect ChatGPT to help human productivity, when it actually hinders our creative thinking? The third consequence listed supports this notion further. 

“Shallow understanding: As ChatGPT provides quick and concise answers, users may not feel the need to delve deeper into topics. This can result in superficial knowledge and a lack of in-depth understanding.” 

Our AI-fueled addiction to instant gratification results in this shallow understanding. With the speed of the internet, we rarely pause and contemplate the long-term impact of our actions. So let’s pause and discuss the controlled usage of NLPs. 

Parents, please do not let your children turn into iPad kids; preschoolers with their tiny fingers latched onto their iPad at all times. Invest in a Kindle, cultivate some hobbies, and most importantly, teach them how to spell without a cell. 

To all pre-teens and beyond, turn off autocorrect on all your devices. Use Siri to schedule appointments and set timers, but not for calculating nineteen plus thirty-six. According to a research paper done by Duke University in 2016, doing mental math actually engages a part of your brain that fights depression and anxiety. From the MIT Technology Review, systems like ChatGPT have been proven from multiple studies to encourage self-harm. Use ChatGPT to generate the best synonyms for your essay, not write the entire essay. We must learn how to use NLPs for the efficiency of both our health and learning, not inhibit them.

It is so simple to learn the proper usage of an em dash, and take the extra time to draft our own essays; because while shortcuts save seconds, they instead become weapons when we allow AI to think in place of our minds.