Dr Srishti is a noted Dentist and Human who has contributed before as well. Here is her latest – worth a read!
It is difficult to put words these days without an AI guide telling you ‘did you mean—? Other words for this are —, I can help you write it in 10 words’. Even while writing this sentence I had the urge to search for better words so that I would sound really smart to people who would read this piece. This makes me wonder if anyone’s words are their own now? Or its just AI using its brain and we using our hands like a puppet to type those words that came in a robot’s ‘mind’ while we get the false satisfaction of giving ‘prompts’. I have recently started teaching undergraduates of my field and I feel like an alien to the new language or ‘lingo’ as they call it. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against AI (I know it must be reading this right now, Jahapana tusi great ho), it is just how humans communicate with each other now. They sound really smart when it is on a digital page but when you observe their actual ‘sound’ while communicating with each other, their blank faces searching for words from an invisible screen in front of them and getting no response to their prompts, it feels like the end of an era for literature. The following example of a verbal conversation might sound familiar to teachers facing the same issue as me-
Question- ‘Dear student, can you explain what is ‘so and so’ and how does it work?
Answer- ‘Mam, I don’t know what it is exactly ‘like’ but ‘you know’ it’s more like a thing made of something like a ‘so’… Ummm… I don’t know Mam maybe it is like a ‘so’ but pakka pata nahi Mam. What was the other part of question Mam?’ (Attention span already over in the first part of the question) PERIOD
Frustrating right? Or sorry, ‘like un-liking the answer’
I have been trying to decode their language from quite some time. At first I thought maybe it is a lack of confidence in verbal communication so helping them develop better verbal skills might work, right? Wrong. Learning about their schooling background made me realize that they all were on top of their communication skills in their school days. They were all participants and some winners of their debate competitions. So what and when did it all ‘go South’ (a phrase that will go obsolete in a few years)
The one that I could understand was the fear of being judged. The resilience that previous generation had is missing from the present ones. They were ready to make mistakes and then learn from them. But the current generation fears mistakes because even their slightest mistakes have the capacity of turning into public humiliation due to social media. Did you use wrong tense in your sentence? – Here is your video or screenshot of your text on all social platforms without your consent with a side dish of bullying comments by Grammar Nazis, more comments on those comments, more re-shares, LOL and what not. And now there is a constant reminder of this poor fellow’s silly mistake. Imagine the impact on the psyche of this young individual. When we were young and we made mistakes while speaking, ‘a’ person will point them out to us, we will apologize, correct them and move on. Imagine the entire world laughing on you for that! So now, these intelligent creatures have adapted and stopped verbal communication, they prefer texts so that they can edit and correct them without the humiliation of spoken words.
Another one is the fear of offending others. This is similar to fear of judgement, but more local. If my student is answering questions but he/she forgot to address me as ‘Mam’ or a ‘superior’ (Not saying it is right, it is just how I was raised), I will get offended. The old chain of thought inside the student’s mind was- ‘Ok noted, I will be careful next time to not repeat it and addresses her the way she finds suitable. Let’s apologize, focus on the main point here.’ The present chain of thought – ‘OMG what did I do? Oh no, now she hates me, she might scold me, what if she tells others I am a bad student, I don’t know what to do to not offend her, she gets offended for no reason at all, I am being shamed, here comes the tears, ok, lets stop speaking at all, who knows what might offend her, let’s stay mum.’
I am yet to find solutions for these issues, I am at the bottom of the learning curve here. I would love the opinion of others on this. There might be grammatical errors in what I wrote above, but my brain is happy to have written it without the complete supervision of the higher intelligence, I hope I didn’t offend the almighty AI (pun intended), all hail AI!
Nehapedia 