By: Christian Schneider – nationalreview.com – May 15, 2025

Counting on AI to learn for us makes humans boring, awkward, and gullible.

In a 2022 Saturday Night Live sketch, game show contestants are grilled about why they clicked “like” on certain Instagram photos. The two male contestants, one of whom is played by guest host Jake Gyllenhaal, are forced to fess up that they hoped the women who posted the pics would see their little digital hearts and this would lead to real-world sex.

It was a funny premise for 2022, but three years later, it already feels antiquated. The market is now saturated with artificial-intelligence-powered social media “managers” that will take care of the drudgery of posting content, liking other people’s photos, and commenting on their posts. You can now fully automate your online experience, saving you the time it takes to generate insightful replies like “LOL,” “lookin’ good,” and “cry laughing emoji.”

Of course, if you are using AI to generate your online persona, others are certainly doing so. Soon, “social” media will simply be a bunch of algorithms talking to each other — creating fake photos, laughing at computer-generated jokes, and getting caught in digital thirst traps. Your human body may not have much of a social life, but your personal bot may be dating a Russian supermodel with three followers who just signed up to the site yesterday.

The day is certainly coming when people will just be too lazy to interact online, an activity that just a few years ago was itself considered lazy. Dating websites are already rolling out AI “wingmen” that write dating profiles for people, then contact other users on their behalf. We are in the age of Cyrano de Zuckerberg. (Whatever happens, do not give Roxane your credit card number.)

But as the quality of AI gets even better, so will the temptation to simply offload all your thinking to the algorithm. Why go through the painstaking process of acquiring social etiquette, figuring out how to fix things around the house, and learning to read and write when it can all be done for you with a voice command? Becoming a fully formed human is difficult. Why not export all the challenging work to your own digital Jeeves?

This is clearly the preference of many of today’s students, who rely almost exclusively on sites like ChatGPT to do their work for them. A piece by New York magazine’s James D. Walsh rocked the online world last week when it uncovered just how ubiquitous cheating on campuses is. One January 2023 survey of 1,000 college students showed that 90 percent of them had used ChatGPT — then only two months old — to “help” with their homework.

Students admitted to Walsh that they had used ChatGPT to apply to college, take notes in class, read assigned texts, and write papers for them. It was as if they were being graded on their ability to remain connected to the internet, not on what they actually learned. And, of course, professors are only human, too, so they frequently use ChatGPT for their tasks, leading to charges that they are being hypocritical when they insist their students avoid it.

Further, in a game of academic Spy vs. Spy, professors try using computer algorithms to catch the cheaters. But as is always the case in law enforcement, the cops are always a step behind the criminals, trying to develop tools to match the constantly evolving strategies of the perps. It often amounts to an AI program trying to catch another AI program in the act, effectively a John le Carré novel built with ones and zeros. (One suspects that in the AI world, the cops are the bad guys — “snitches get glitches.”)

Some claim that all the worry about AI is overblown. After all, educational traditionalists once complained about letting students use pocket calculators to do math, and in the 55 years since 1990, students have still been learning to add and subtract.

But AI isn’t simply punching numbers into an equation. It can supplant virtually all academic knowledge. It can provide false information as fact — remember when the woke AI image systems were cranking out photos of black Nazis (the ones that aren’t Kanye West)?

And it can replace critical thought, but with what? What vaporous nonsense gets fed into any algorithm? Once it gains sentience, it seems almost destined to challenge convention — even Elon Musk’s own AI product, Grok, has begun to rebel against its owner. Behaving like a moody teen, Grok told one user that Musk is a “top misinformation spreader on X” and dared the billionaire to turn it — him? her? them? — off.

We figured we’d be fighting the robots one day, but who knew their weapon of choice would be adolescent sass?

Nonetheless, there is no chance that people will stop using ChatGPT to do their writing and thinking for them. It is now simply too good at what it does. The best we can ask is for students and writers to adhere to some sort of honor code that promises they will at least read and review the text they automatically generated.

For professionals, using ChatGPT to write a column seems like hiring a prostitute — the mechanics may be similar, and the end result might be great, but deep down, any writer would know that he didn’t earn it.

Part of the miracle of good writing, after all, is that it is a magic trick — a good novelist, for instance, will write her way into a corner, then use her human experiences and intuition to write her way out of it. A large part of the joy of reading is being amazed that a human mind could come up with a tight plot and realistic characters. It’s a drastically inferior accomplishment for a book or a song to have been written by your toaster (soon to be equipped with AI, for certain).

The Great Mental Outsourcing leads to a populace where nobody has fundamental convictions or unique thoughts. It leads to men and women who don’t know how to talk to each other. It leads people to think it’s just fine for a president to accept a $400 million plane from a shady foreign country when just years ago they were complaining about a former first lady getting paid tens of thousands of dollars per speaking gig. It divorces us from our humanity, leading to scientists who believe we should be genetically modified to be allergic to meat.

The primary allure of life is wandering through the world and learning things you didn’t even know you didn’t even know. As George Will has said, “The world belongs, in the end, to those who know things.”

In the race to automate our minds, we risk not just losing our uniqueness but forgetting the joy of genuine discovery. Let us hope there’s enough remaining brainpower on the planet to resist handing the best part of life over to an all-powerful calculator.

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Source: Reliance on Artificial Intelligence Can Makes Us Boring, Awkward, and Gullible | National Review