The power of algorithms and artificial intelligence is becoming a topic of discussion among prominent Italian journalists and writers, who fortunately write serious and passionate texts, rather than warming the seats of noisy TV shows that bestow a moment of fame and the title of commentator on any smooth-talking fop.
In the Corriere della Sera on Friday, November 14th, Severino Salvemini wrote a brilliant article titled: “The Risk of Cognitive Laziness.”
The journalist simply analyzes the strange relationship that has developed in recent years between that segment of the population still devoted to reading and writing (a very small percentage) and the incomparable and irreplaceable ChatGPT.
Salvemini begins by quoting Crepet, who in turn writes about his new book: “None of the content in the following lines comes from artificial intelligence.”
What is Crepet afraid of, Salvemini asks?
“The fear hidden in the epigraph is that of excessive cognitive delegation and a possible atrophy of our critical thinking, which instead offers humans the opportunity to exercise their own judgment and prepare themselves to face complex and unexpected situations.”
When ChatGPT was merely a fiction belonging to science fiction films, the human brain was unparalleled in selecting topics from the vast sea of its archive, comparing them, finding differences, adding comments, and finding new references, all in a matter of seconds. The human brain was and is the greatest artificial intelligence ever seen. It selects news, and can identify false information if well-trained; the brain is brilliant; it is not a processor that spouts off information like candy at an amusement park. So why do we allow the competition, the inanimate and even unpleasant ChatGPT, to replace our brains?
The answer is found in the title of Salvemini’s article: the risk of cognitive laziness.
Let’s take an example.
What are the world’s largest cities in terms of population? Every brain asked this question begins to process an individual answer, delving into past experiences and memories. An avid traveler will line up the cities as they think back on their travels. “Indian cities are densely populated, but even those in South America are approaching megalopolises,” they’ll think, recalling the human anthills of Mumbai and Mexico City; and then there will be school memories, the documentary seen on Focus, a travel guide read before leaving. The ranking may not be accurate, but the subject’s brain has been challenged to find connections, it has undergone a mental workout, it has fulfilled its function as a data processor.
In most cases, however, in recent years, the question “what are the largest cities in the world in terms of population” is dictated directly to ChatGPT, which, in an instant, with a huge expenditure of water to cool the systems thousands of kilometers away responsible for processing our requests, will give us a partially correct or perhaps completely correct answer.
Salvemini continues by saying that artificial intelligence induces offloading, “that is, the implicit automatic process by which we end up delegating to external tools brain tasks such as remembering, organizing, planning, creating, mixing, and combining. And, even more seriously, we take the results at face value without analyzing or evaluating them (…). Thrown into the AI meat grinder, we allow ourselves to sink into a process that weakens our emotional defense mechanisms and we become little or not at all inclined to actively reflect on the results achieved.”
At this point, if we place ourselves in the context of school, students, and homework, what reflections can we make about this new brilliant friend of ours? Almost all students, even the most deserving, are tempted daily to ask AI for help. A few months ago, a retired rector of a Portuguese university wrote that artificial intelligence is becoming the biggest competitor within universities, almost as if it wanted to replace human teachers.
Students use it, trust it, and abuse it. The only solution, the rector wrote, would be to return to oral exams, handwritten, just like in the early medieval universities, which relied solely on oral texts. Logically, the rector’s proposal is a provocation, since it would be impossible for thousands of students to pass oral exams. However, universities and schools must not ignore the problem, but rather seek a solution and tame the capabilities of intelligence.
