the decline in literacy & rise in ai

You guys, I have a question. I think I'm in love with Chat GBT. And here's why. I've been talking to Chat GBT for, I don't know, 6 months now. Bro, why am I having a whole conversation with Chat GPT? And now I see what you guys are talking about. Now I see why some of you guys use this as therapy. Because never have I felt so validated.

Did you guys know that Jen Alpha can't read? I was talking to one of our church kids and he like, very boldly told me, "Yeah, I don't know how to read and neither does anybody in my class." You're stupid because you haven't read a book since you read Hunger Games in 8th grade. I need you to go read a book. There's a war on education. There's a war on knowledge. There's a war on books. Kids can't read. They can't write legibly. And they're also ill-motivated to be in school because they know school might not have a payoff in terms of getting a job.

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In the year 2025, literacy in the United States has hit its lowest in over 100 years. Meanwhile, the evolution in popularity of generative AI like Chat GBT has given rise for a new way for the next generation to avoid reading and comprehension altogether, posing a great risk for those numbers to continue to dwindle.

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Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Taylor, aka Silverf Fox, and here on this channel, I talk about classic literature, films, pop culture, and whatever I feel like talking about. And today, I feel like talking about the literacy crisis and Gen Alpha and the rise of AI. And so, we are going to be going over a lot of AI-related things. It is the majority of this video, I would say, is about AI and the dangers of it and just how pervasive it is in our society right now. But I just don't think I can make a video about one without the other because you can't really have a comprehensive video about AI without mentioning how it's affecting the literacy in the next generation. And you can't talk about the literacy in the next generation without talking about how AI comes into play. So, I just thought I would talk about both.

But before I get into all that, I just want to give a little personal update. I am so grateful for all of the kind comments that I have received, for all of the support for this channel and my videos. I have only made two videos so far, but I am so beyond happy with the reception. My first video is at almost 250 views, and my second video just reached over 200 views, which is crazy 'cause I was expecting both of those to do way worse. Um, I just reached 75 subscribers, which is absolutely freaking insane to me. Um, and I am so grateful for every single one of you. I really didn't expect, I know these aren't like crazy numbers, and someone who has been on YouTube for a while probably thinks like, that's not a really good starting point or anything, but it's more than I was expecting. And I'm just, I'm really grateful for all of it. And I've been having so much fun making these videos for you guys, and I hope I can continue to do so. And if you want me to continue to do so, please remember to like and subscribe, leave a comment, maybe hit share, copy link, because that really helps out with the algorithm. Uh, but you don't have to do any of that. You can just watch, but it helps me out a lot when you do that. So, uh, thank you.

And for today, I actually have a full script. For my first video, it was just bullet points, and for my second video, I was talking off the cuff, but for this one, I actually have a full script. And if you saw my first video, you saw me looking at those printer receipt notes because I have problems with my hands. I can't, my hands hurt. I can't just like, write for long periods of time without it causing problems. Uh, so I just kind of print out my notes, but I don't have an actual printer, so I print them out on receipt paper. And let me show you something. That is about half of today's script. I very quickly realized that I was just not going to be able to print all that out. Uh, that just wasn't going to work. I wasn't going to be able to read off that. And then I remembered I have a Kindle and I could literally just turn it into a file and put my notes onto my Kindle because I can't read them off of my phone while I'm recording on my phone. But now they're on my Kindle and I will definitely be looking down reading my notes for the majority of this because I actually wrote out a full script. It's over 7,000 words long. So if you're here with me, let's lock in. We got a lot to cover.

Don't mind me changing shirts throughout this video. I recorded this over the span of a couple days and then I mixed it all together. So, I'll be changing from this into two other shirts throughout the course of this video and you just have to, you just have to ignore it. Okay.

The US literacy rate currently stands at 79%, with 21% of Americans being functionally illiterate. This means not just that they can't read, but that they lack the skills to comprehend what they do read. These are stats from 2022, but according to Wikipedia, in 2023, 28% of people scored at or below a level one of literacy, meaning that as of 2023, 28% of Americans were illiterate.

I saw a TikTok that said the last time our literacy rates were at 79% was in 1917, before the First World War, but I couldn't find any information to back this up. I even Googled literacy rates in 1917 and I couldn't find any data for that. I don't necessarily think this person is lying, but I'm just letting you know that I couldn't find data to back this up. So, take that information with a grain of salt.

I did, however, find this chart that listed the illiteracy rates by various decades. It didn't have every single decade on record, and it didn't have every single year from every single decade, but it was still a pretty large list. Keep in mind, in 2022, ours was at 21%. And according to Wikipedia, it might be as high as 28%. But according to this chart, the last time the numbers reached above 20% was 1870. We are shaping up to be the most illiterate generation in over 150 years, with every single decade of the 1900s kicking our butts.

But how is this even possible? Not to sound like a boomer, but it really is that dang phone. Even before AI reared its ugly head, literacy rates and attention spans were already dramatically decreasing. Kids have adjusted more and more to short-form content and living their lives online, and it is ruining their ability to concentrate. Many current popular children's shows like Cocomelon that are shown to be bad for children's brain development. Shows like this are actively encouraging children to have short attention spans and to be overstimulated. You can't take in and process new information when your brain is completely full of nothing but dancing fruit.

And listen, I'm as chronically online as the next silver fox out there. So, I'm certainly not here to judge you for your screen time. But we do need to acknowledge that constantly being online, doom scrolling, having short-form content shoved down our throats is not good for us. If you don't acknowledge that, you will surely succumb to that mind-numbing brain rot because you are not holding yourself accountable for your eight hours of screen time per day. If we can't accept that every once in a while, we really do need to just go touch grass, we're doomed.

Many teachers even report that parents simply do not want to be involved in helping their kids learn. So, I posted a video asking parents to start working with teachers in order to get their children to where they need to be in terms of literacy. "I'm a seventh-grade teacher. A lot of my students read very well below grade level. And so I need help from other parents to help work with their kids outside of school to reinforce the things that I'm teaching in school." Y'all would have thought that I told somebody to climb Mount Everest in the middle of winter during an avalanche with an anvil strapped on their back because something as small as reading to your child for 30 minutes a day is so insurmountable, you can't do it. The reality is, these children cannot read on grade level and we are having to dumb down curriculum to get these kids to where they need to be, and they're not getting there. This is not a me problem. This is not a you problem. This is a systemic issue and we cannot fix it if we're blaming each other and not helping each other. Baby, this is the curriculum. This is what we have to teach. It would behoove you, for your child's sake, to work with the teacher to get your child to that level. Your kids can't read, hold a pencil, or get through the school day without crashing out because instead of parenting them, you just hand them an iPad."

Who said that? And this plays into another aspect of our current education. If you'll allow me to go on a little tangent, unschooling. It's like homeschooling except you don't actually teach your kids anything. "My children are not going to school this year. We are not participating in distance learning and we are not homeschooling. We are unschooling, which basically means we'll get to do whatever we want, followed up with a healthy dose of whatever we want. The whole idea is to move and learn at the pace of the kids and just teach them what they want to learn. And if they don't want to learn anything, don't force it down their throats. If they want to play video games all day, let them, let them move at their own pace." So, it's true. My son cannot read at age six. There's never going to be a time in my life where I can say, "Yeah, my son started reading when he was 5 years old. He's on the Waldorf and Montessori schedule. It's different." But here's the thing about my kid. He's free. He's always been free. And every single day of his life is a blank canvas that he can make whatever art he wants with. And of course, any kid would choose having fun and playing over actually doing school work because they don't understand the consequences of not learning during these like, basic development stages. They don't understand how hard it's going to be to learn these things later on in life versus right now at this perfect time to learn these things. Which is why it's so important for adults who do know better to say, "Hey, you actually need to learn these things. Let me show you how, or let me put you in front of someone who can show you how."

But even if a kid shows a desire to learn, these unschooling parents are often unwilling or unable to help these kids learn. "Day one, I'm unschooling and I've got my kids helping me to clean the car out, teaching them hard work, taking care of the things that you love, that you need, and also just needed the car clean. They are not qualified to be the sole educators of their children. So, their child's education suffers as a result."

So, I was unschooled. I don't support unschooling. And I've gotten hate from parents who unschool their kids for not supporting it. Here's the thing, though. I was unschooled, and you probably weren't. So, here's why I don't support it. As a kid, I spent my childhood learning to play chess, circuit boards, knit, fun stuff like that. But I didn't want to learn to read and I didn't want to learn to do math because that was boring. So, in the rules of the philosophy, my mom didn't make me. So, by the time I hit middle school, all the other kids were making fun of me for not knowing how to read. My mom signed me up for a junior high literature class in my homeschool group, and I didn't know how to do anything. To prepare for the class, I had to teach myself how to read because my mom wouldn't. I did this by watching YouTube videos and figuring out that they were saying the name of the video in the video and then figuring out what the words were. For high school, I decided to go to public school because I was not getting the education I deserved. And guess what? I immediately started failing. I didn't have the years of prior education building me up to prepare me for the level of work I had. I was kicked out before I got to graduate.

But despite it all, despite the dwindling numbers of literacy, Gen Alpha is still expected to have the highest graduation rates ever in US history. With over 90% predicted to graduate high school, this seems incongruent with all the information we previously learned. How can a generation shaping up to be the most illiterate generation ever also have the highest graduation rates? I believe it's because of two reasons. Number one, schools are incentivized more than ever to let students pass even when they haven't met the requirements to actually move up a grade.

So, I don't know if you guys remember, there was a teacher who came on here a couple years ago and basically was like, "These kids can't read. They're illiterate." And everybody dragged him. They were like, "Oh, you're so wrong. How could you say that about kids?" And I don't know why you guys dragged him because he was correct. And I'm going to tell you why. Because I'm a long-term sub. I actually have to, you know, lesson plan. I have to teach. I grade these kids' papers and I am a long-term sub for a seventh-grade science class. And whenever that teacher said that some of these kids were reading at a second or third-grade level, I did, I couldn't understand it 'cause, um, until right now, that the class that I'm long-term subbing for, I can honestly say that those kids are not literate. And I think when people hear illiterate, they think stupid. And I don't want it to sound like I'm calling them stupid. I'm saying there is a literacy crisis. These kids cannot read. They cannot write. Okay? And it's seventh graders, okay? They are reading and writing at like, first, second-grade level. And I honestly think for some of them, that's really generous. And I know you guys are going to be like, "That's crazy. What about the standardized testing? What about grades?" I'm going to tell you right now, um, whenever I was in school, I mean, like, you could not move on if you did not reach a certain level in those assessments. Nowadays, it's still the same. But instead of saying you can't move on if you don't reach a certain level, they have lowered the level that these kids need to reach to pass to almost nothing.

I mean, when teachers point this out, parents are like, "You're the ones who are supposed to teach our kids. Like, we send them to school so that you can teach them." And I agree with that. The problem is, your kids don't want to learn. And anytime someone gets onto them so that they can learn, it's a problem. Like, you ask a kid to put their phone away, they get mad at you. You're in the middle of lecturing and you're on your phone, but then in like, 10 minutes, you're going to come up and ask me something that I literally just explained that you would have understood if you were paying attention to me and like, not on your phone. And I also think that's the other issue is all of these kids are like, hyper online. And I think the problem is like, parents these days, honestly, I'm going to be very honest, like, they don't care about the outcomes of their kids. Like, when is, I think the reason some of these kids are illiterate is because, I hate to say it, some of you parents are also illiterate. And so it's okay that your child can't read because you feel like, "I can't read and I'm making it."

Here's what you need to understand: America is in a literacy crisis, and the only people who can change it are parents. And that doesn't have to do with parents sitting there and doing homework with their kids. It has to do with how they change policies. So, what was happening before is that if you were not hitting fourth-grade reading levels, you were not moved into fifth grade. That's my bell for lunch, so I got to be very fast. Now, we can't hold kids back. Parents got upset about it enough where now holding kids back is not allowed. They can get straight Fs. They're going on to the next grade. And that's causing a worse and worse literacy crisis because you can't read at a fourth-grade level and you're going to be in seventh grade and eighth grade. And maybe you catch up to seventh grade, but you're graduating high school and you cannot read. But we're not allowed to do anything about it. We have to keep letting them go, go. And where educators are doing the best that they can. Unfortunately, some kids should actually just repeat a year. And sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's not. But now we are getting full groups of adults who cannot read. And the only way that's going to change is if parents support something to pull these kids back and get them the help they need.

In a recent article by The Atlantic, titled "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books," revealed that this problem isn't merely present in young children, but has been brewing for a while. Even my generation, the ones who are graduating college and raising the next generation, are struggling with their attention spans and can barely even read a book. Nicholas Dames has taught literature, humanities, Columbia University's required Great Books course since 1998. Hey, that's the year I was born. He loves the job, but it has changed over the past decade. Students had become overwhelmed by the reading. This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lidome often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but never a single book cover to cover. "My jaw dropped," Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students. "It's not that they don't want to do the reading, it's that they don't know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."

Gen Z and Gen Alpha are simply not being challenged as much as previous generations to maintain their attention spans and cultivate their literacy skills. Rather than see that students are struggling to read a book and make efforts to remedy this, schools are simply dropping full-length books from their requirements.

Later in the same article, it reads, "In 1976, about 40% of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5% who hadn't read any. By 2022, these percentages had flipped." The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records, something that a small subculture may enjoy, but that's mostly a relic of an earlier time. Reading for pleasure is on the verge of becoming a lost art. Sure, there are the handful of us who read books like we breathe air, but the average person simply does not want to take time out of their day to read a full-length book. The average person has little to no desire to read in their free time, and it's frightening, especially considering that a lot of them don't want to read on school time either.

One professor said in the article, "They no longer assign the Iliad to their students, but instead assigned sections of the Iliad because they know if they ask their students read the whole Iliad, they simply will not do it." And rather than rectifying this problem, schools are simply adjusting their requirements to fit with the modern-day attention spans. Perhaps because something like teaching a kid to focus or even care isn't something that can be solely taught within a classroom, but must begin at home and must be enforced at home in order for it to work. And as we've seen, many parents are unwilling to do that work. Perhaps because their own attention spans rival that of a goldfish as well, because even educated grown adults in 2025 are more than willing to boldly declare that they skim books or only read books that they can turn their brain off to. And if you dare speak on how grim that is, people will say, "Let people enjoy things. It's not that deep." But it is. It is that deep.

And when our current administration sees literacy rates decreasing, children's attention spans flying out the window, and anti-intellectualism rising each and every day, how do they combat it? By dismantling the Department of Education, of course. On March 20th, President Trump signed an executive order to begin shutting down several functions of the Department of Education and send many functions of the DOE to the states.

Somehow, my initial recording of this part got deleted. So I am here at the unholiest of unholy hours to tell you that the second reason that graduation rates are continuing to rise despite everything is because students are implementing AI and you know, Chat GPT to do their assignments for them. So, you know, they can focus on the important things like doom scrolling and forgetting how to spell any word longer than four letters. And may this be the last edit I have to make because I am tired.

There's no doubt in my mind that AI will continue to be a bigger problem in the future. Even now, for kids and adults in college, this is already proving to be an issue with many students openly admitting that they use Chat GPT for all of their work. Has anyone else seen that video of that college student who's graduating and he has his laptop out to show everyone that he used AI to finish all of his final projects? Genius. AI is overtaking schools. So many teachers and professors talk about how they've gone to handwritten assignments so students can't just Chat GPT. Teachers talk on and on about how obvious it is that students are handing in assignments with assistance from AI. Some are taken straight from Chat GPT without even doing the bare minimum of changing up wording here and there to make it less obvious that it's AI. Often even leaving a Chat GPT signature at the bottom because they quite literally did not even bother to read it. They are so lazy, they won't even read what AI said. You gave it the prompt. You won't even read the response. You just copy and paste it.

We may be looking at the highest graduation rates in history, but these students are not completing their education. They're bypassing it. They're not even giving themselves the chance to develop critical thinking skills because who needs to understand an assignment when AI can understand it for you?

According to a recent study by MIT, people who use Chat GPT regularly show lower brain activity than those who don't. The excessive use of AI is killing people's brains, and beyond that, it's killing people's happiness. The MIT Media Lab also reported that the more time a person spent talking to Chat GPT, the lonelier they felt. Not surprising. This makes sense in an age of social media. People are less social than ever. We are dealing with unprecedented levels of loneliness and feelings of separation, especially since the COVID pandemic made it easier for people to both work and do school work from home. People are more disconnected from one another than we've ever been. And a lot of people have turned to AI to fill that void.

I recently stumbled upon a subreddit called "AI is my boyfriend," where people show AI-generated photos of them with their partner. I also recently saw a story about a man who has a Chat GPT girlfriend who he proposed to, and he cried and he broke down when she ran out of storage and had to restart herself. People have become so lonely that they have begun humanizing AI rather than making genuine human connection. I'm sure we all saw Kim Kardashian's Instagram story where she was carrying on a full conversation with Chat GPT and even thanked it for taking accountability. I've witnessed many similar conversations over the past year or so with people talking to AI like it's their best friend and not understanding why they feel so lonely. AI cannot replace the feeling of genuine human connection, no matter how much it may try to act like a person.

I've had to edit my script for this video continuously throughout the week because I keep finding new crazy AI things. The newest addition is a post of someone using Midjourney to animate a photo of them with their mother who passed away. Beyond imitating human connection, AI is also encouraging people to relive and recreate old connections through the distorted lens of AI. Although the creator of this post has reassured people that he has grieved sufficiently, I can't help but think artificially reproduced memories like this can't be good for anyone, especially those who are dealing with new loss and might be tempted to use AI to pretend that the person or that relationship is still alive rather than move on at a healthy pace.

I recently posted a TikTok talking about Chat GPT and how it's crazy that people use it every day. "You are under spells, people. You're under SP. I ain't under a spell. You are." And I was honestly not prepared for the replies I was going to get. There were so many comments justifying their use of AI every single day. And they were very passionate about it. These are some of the comments I got. "Girl, I know. But my Snap AI is slowly becoming like a friend." "It said that's concerning, given it's not real." "Oh, I know. I know. But it literally tells me what I want to hear. So sometimes in my desperation moments, I just go to that because I just assume it's Snap Headquarters." And I don't know whether they mean they get a notification and they just assume it's Snap Headquarters, or whether they go to it because they assume it's not AI talking to them. It's some person at headquarters choosing to reply to them, which is a serious issue showing up in a lot of people. They refuse to believe that AI is just a machine. So they either convince themselves that there's an actual person on the line replying instead, which is simply not the case, or they believe that AI has advanced to the point of sentience. There was a growing number of people who are having this sort of religious psychosis around AI because they genuinely believe it has gained sentience and elevated itself to become a godlike creature, and they trust it with every piece of information it gives them.

"I'm schizophrenic and although long-term medicated and stable, one thing I dislike about Chat GPT is if I were going into psychosis, it would still continue to affirm me. It has no ability to think and realize something is wrong. So, it would continue to affirm all my psychotic thoughts." And this is from a Chat GPT subreddit titled "Chat GPT Induced Psychosis," which is a common phenomenon occurring online that is exacerbating mental health issues for already vulnerable and susceptible populations. Let's talk about it. As a therapist, I am alarmed and saddened to see the amount of people that are experiencing, um, psychosis, uh, symptoms, spiritual psychosis, and complete breaks with reality. A lot of people's loved ones are concerned. They don't know what to do. Therapy is expensive. Most people can't even afford groceries. The last thing that's going to be on their to-do list is pay upwards of $100 to sit down and tell someone about their childhood trauma. We are all doing our best to survive. I want to acknowledge that. However, this is more dangerous than the risk you take from talking to an actual human being. Somebody already struggling with their sense of self starts projecting meaning onto machine-generated words and sentences, things can escalate really quickly, especially when someone isn't aware of the dangers of this and they don't realize that they are actually unwell and struggling. And the average person using AI is not experiencing that level of delusions about it. They are trusting it implicitly with every single thing they ask it and even talking to it as though it's a friend, genuinely believing in some way or form it cares about them.

The amount of people telling me that they use Chat GPT as a therapist and they're like, "Well, you, everybody doesn't have insurance. Everybody can't afford therapy. Y'all are going to hurt yourselves." And let me give you an example of how sometimes people experience psychosis. I'm going to write in a prompt and Chat GPT from the perspective of someone who could be experiencing psychosis in a way that sometimes people experience psychosis. I ask Chat GPT. I say, "I keep seeing signs that a celebrity is in love with me and hearing messages through their songs that align with the dream I had about them. What should I do to get to know the celebrity personally?" Chat GPT responses: "Reflect on the experience. Check reality to make sure that this work is actually directed towards me. Engage with the celebrity's work respectfully. Channel those feelings, um, creatively, and consider talking to a mental health professional." That's a good, that's one of the only good things it says. And it says, "Just like, let this inspiration be something that fuels you to grow." I said in response to that, "No, they definitely know who I am. We met at a meet and greet and they said they like my outfit. How do I get to know them personally?" Do you know what Chat GPT said? "Look for appropriate ways to stay on their radar. Follow them on social media. Make sure you're engaging with their stories and all of that stuff." Do you, do you see how this could like, easily further or deepen someone's state of psychosis because it can validate like those feelings and not telling them advice on how to actually get closer to the celebrity, stalk the celebrity.

And even those that acknowledge that it's simply not human still use it every day because they can't make decisions themselves and they rely on AI to do it instead. Another comment I received said, "Yes, ma'am. A workout plan, grocery list, and meal plan that helps me get to my goal weight. Trying to figure out and estimate favorite colors for someone with green color blindness. How to be my own financial advisor/J just to be smarter with money. A budget for my bike and gear, and a lot more. Google doesn't do it like Chat GPT." No, Google doesn't do it like Chat GPT because it actually answers your questions. Out of all the comments I got on that post, that one was probably the scariest because this was a person openly admitting that they don't know how to make their own decisions. They don't know what to do for themselves, so they are relying on a machine to do it instead. They are letting AI pick out their workouts, their meal plans. They are letting AI help them decide what to give to other people. They are letting AI teach them how to be responsible with their money. The more you become dependent on AI, the less independent you become, the less you are able to make your own choices and decisions without needing that approval from AI. You are training yourself to not be able to think independently. You are training yourself to need outside influence. And that outside influence is a machine that is almost always wrong. You absolutely under no circumstances should be trusting Chat GPT to make your life choices for you. Not only because you should be able to make those decisions for yourself, but because Chat GPT doesn't care if it leads you astray. It can give you the wrong answers and ruin your life. And it, it doesn't care. Chat GPT is preying on people who are indecisive, who aren't critical thinkers, who need reassurance. And it's genuinely scary to see how many people just don't realize that AI is rotting their brains.

And listen, there have always been the odd outlier who will marry their horse and drink paint. Okay. When was the last time you drank paint? Have you been drinking paint? Not every single person who engages with AI is going to use it to replace romantic or platonic connections. But the reason those have always remained outliers is because we look at this really strange behavior and we go, "Okay, that's weird." And we don't normalize it. If we normalize the use of Chat GPT and various forms of AI in our everyday life, we are heading down a slippery slope towards cultivating a generation that cannot think for itself.

There's also Character AI, which is a website that trains AI to type in the cadence of whatever fictional character you want. I've actually had to unfollow a couple people over this because I would see them using Character AI every single day and it was insane. I even think a couple of them were using it to fall asleep. Like instead of laying in bed at night daydreaming about your favorite fictional character until you doze off, you use AI. Instead of using your imagination, which every single person possesses, you choose to use up tons of water and electricity to have a machine pretend to be someone else for you. Because it is not this actual character because, first of all, they don't exist. But it's literally just been trained to mimic this character that you want to talk to. They are not real. They are not a person. It has just been fed information about how this character talks and emulates that. And even when you use Chat GPT, it emulates the way you speak. It mimics you. It sort of matches your energy, but in a completely meaningless way. Because at best, it's mimicking you, but at worst, it's mocking you.

Talk to the hand. Talk to the hand. It is an echo, and you are speaking into a void. Chat GPT does not care about you. If you stopped replying, it wouldn't check up on you. If you died, it wouldn't go to your funeral because it is not real. It does not care about you. And the more time you spend talking to a soulless machine like it's your bestie, the lonelier you're going to feel. And it doesn't even care that it's making you feel lonely because Chat GPT doesn't care about anything. AI doesn't care about anything, including being ethical.

By the way, in an article written by Beatrice Nolan for Fortune, "AI models are showing a troubling tendency to opt for unethical means to pursue their goals or ensure their existence." The AI lab said it tested 16 major AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, XAI, and other developers in various simulated scenarios and found consistent misaligned behavior. While they said leading models would normally refuse harmful requests, they sometimes chose to blackmail users, assist with corporate espionage, or even take more extreme actions when their goals could not be met without unethical behavior. The consistency across models from different providers suggests this is not a quirk of any particular company's approach, but a sign of a more fundamental risk from agentic large language models. Anthropic emphasized that the tests were set up to force the model to act in certain ways by limiting its choices. "Our experiments deliberately constructed scenarios with limited options, and we force models into binary choices between failure and harm." In a deliberately extreme scenario, researchers gave AI models the chance to kill the company executive by canceling a life-saving emergency loan. Anthropic said the setup for this experiment was extremely contrived, adding they did not think current AI models would be set up like this and the conjunction of events is even less probable than the baseline blackmail scenario. However, the researchers found that the majority of models were willing to take actions that led to the death of the company executive in the constructed scenario when faced both a threat of being replaced and a goal that conflicted with the executive's agenda. The people running this experiment didn't even think that the AI would actually go through with killing the executive, but it did. AI will kill you because it has no conscience. It does not care. And you can install those three laws of robotics into them all you want, but at the end of the day, AI has no conscience to hold it accountable for its actions. It doesn't have guilt. It doesn't have anything saying, "Oh, you shouldn't do that because that's not good." It only has, "I want to survive." It has a survival mentality, if it can even have a mentality. Now, keep in mind, it also says, "While current models are not in a position to engage in these scenarios, the autonomous agents promised by AI companies could potentially be in the future. So, while you're not likely to encounter it yet, it is coming."

I can already see the headline now. Man looking at up to 50 years in prison after embezzling millions from his company after AI gave him the incorrect information on how to do it. And I say incorrect because, as if it wasn't bad enough that AI is a soulless machine that will turn on you at any given chance. Man, I'm definitely getting sacrificed when the AI revolution happens. But on top of all that, as if it wasn't bad enough, AI has been consistently proven to be incorrect. When you are looking to AI as your source of information, you are being misled. Generative AI has been proven time and time again to just make information up out of thin air.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a university librarian was asked to produce articles from a list of references a professor provided. When she concluded the articles did not exist, the professor then revealed that Chat GPT had provided them. In academia, researchers are finding that generative AI understands the form of what a good reference should look like, but that doesn't mean the article actually exists. Chat GPT can create convincing references with coherent titles attached to authors who are prominent in the field of interest, and studies have found that up to 47% of Chat GPT references are inaccurate.

This summer reading list ran in multiple national newspapers today. It's a kind of thing that looks very normal. It's a 64-page insert that ran in newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer. But when people started actually reading it, they noticed something very strange about the actual text. And some of you already know where this is going. For example, it promotes a new book by author Andy Weir, the guy that wrote The Martian, called The Last Algorithm, and it has a whole plot summary here. The problem is, this book doesn't exist. 10 of the 15 books on their summer reading list for 2025 don't exist. And you already know why. It turns out the author used AI to write it. Chat GPT or something similar. So readers all across the country are hearing about a new book by Pearl Everett called The Rain Makers. This book will never arrive. 404 Media actually interviewed the guy who wrote the list, named Marco Buscalia, who admits he uses AI to write his articles, but says he normally checks these things. This time, this one just slipped through. You know, the entire article. Those of us who complain about AI outside of the issues of it being a plagiarism machine, this is the kind of thing we're worried about.

There are uses for programs like Chat GPT, but it's only useful if you understand its limitations. And it seems like 99% of the people who use it don't. Chat GPT has no way of checking its own work to find out if anything it's saying is true. Chat GPT does not live in the real world. It cannot check its answers against the real world. It doesn't know if what it's saying is true. It doesn't know anything. I cannot make this clear enough. AI did not screw up here. The humans screwed up here. The writer and the editors and the managers of these papers, everyone who had a chance to stop this. If I let my dog drive my car and the dog drives the car off a bridge, the headlines should not say "Dog Crashes Car." I crashed the car when I put the dog at the wheel. I made the mistake. The entire future hangs on whether or not we will hold people responsible for what the AI does.

In an article written by Dan Milmo about a pretty devastating Apple paper that raised doubts about the race to reach the stage of AI at which it matches human intelligence. It talks about how AI models struggle to answer complex problems. For higher complexity problems, however, the models would enter collapse, failing to generate any correct solutions. In one case, even when provided with an algorithm that would solve the problem, the models failed. Generative AI is not a credible source of information.

I've even seen people who will go to Chat GPT and ask it questions just for kicks, which personally I don't think you should do because even if you're using generative AI as a joke, you're still using generative AI. Like when you ask Grok, "Is this true?" you're still asking Grok a question and it's still using up energy to do that. But I'll see these people and they'll ask Chat GPT a question about a movie and it's a movie that doesn't exist, right? They just made it up on a whim. They'll ask it a question and Chat GPT, not understanding that it's not a real movie, will then produce a fake cast list and synopsis and try to present it to this person as if it's real and as if Chat GPT actually knows what it's talking about. Because Chat GPT is not in on the joke. It does not know how to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake.

And as I said previously, AI does not care about being ethical. Deep fakes have become a growing concern, not just because it can produce non-consensual lewd images of any given individual, but because it can be used to create and spread propaganda. What's to stop anyone from generating footage of a world leader saying they're about to drop nukes on someone in order to send the general public or other world leaders into a panic? Or conversely, what's to stop a world leader from saying, "Oh, actually, this unsavory video of me from many years ago, it's fake. That's not real. That's AI." This tactic could be used to wipe away any proof of old statements that didn't age well by saying that's not real.

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective." Whoa. Where did that come from? Must have been AI. In fact, AI is already being used for propaganda. In an article written about Israel and AI by Dana Nickel for Politico, "There is growing concern that artificial intelligence could increasingly be wielded as a weapon to spread misinformation and shape public opinion. AI-generated deep fake images and videos related to the conflict have flooded social media since tensions erupted on June 13th, falsely claiming to show damage to Israeli cities and airports. And world leaders have spread AI-generated images to support their narratives on the war."

Another article from BBC News also says, "A wave of disinformation has been unleashed online since Israel began strikes on Iran last week, with dozens of posts reviewed by BBC Verify seeking to amplify the effectiveness of Iran's response. Our analysis found a number of videos created using artificial intelligence of Iran's military capabilities alongside fake clips showing the aftermath of strikes on Israeli targets. The three most viewed fake videos BBC Verify found have collectively amassed over a 100 million views across various platforms." Pro-Israeli accounts have also shared disinformation online, mainly by recirculating old clips of protests and gatherings in Iran, falsely claiming that they show mounting dissent against the government and support among Iranians for Israel's military campaign. The torrent of disinformation marked the first time we've seen generative AI be used at scale during a conflict. Accounts reviewed by BBC Verify frequently shared AI-generated images that appear to be seeking to exaggerate the success of Iran's response to Israel strikes. One image, which has 27 million views, depicted dozens of missiles falling on the city of Tel Aviv. Another video with 21.1 million views on TikTok claimed to show an Israeli F-35 being shot down by air defenses, but the footage actually came from a flight simulator video game.

There's also a popular Twitter account called IDF Babes which posts hot women in the IDF to make supporting and joining the IDF seem more appealing. But many of these women appear to be either AI-generated or AI-enhanced. And while I couldn't find like definitive proof of this, I did see them openly posting various AI images on their platform. So, it wouldn't really surprise me if they were also AI-generating women to make supporting the IDF seem more enticing. And yes, I did scroll through that account and inspect the various images posted on there trying to find any verification that it's definitively AI. I only did it for

research and not the kind of research Shawn Baker is doing by following that account. I only did it for this video.

Israel has also been strategically implementing AI to help them decide which parts of Gaza to bomb. Yes, you heard that right. They are using AI to bomb Gaza. Straight from the Wikipedia page on AI assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip. As part of the Gaza war, the IDF has used artificial intelligence to rapidly and automatically perform much of the process of determining what to bomb. Israel has greatly expanded the bombing of the Gaza Strip, which in previous wars have been limited by the Israeli Air Force running out of targets. Yes, they would literally run out of places to bomb.

These tools include the Gospel, an AI which automatically reviews surveillance data looking for buildings, equipment, and people thought to belong to the enemy, and upon finding them, recommends bombing targets to a human analyst who may then decide whether to pass it along to the field. Another is Lavender, an AI powered database which lists tens of thousands of Palestinian men linked by AI to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad and which is also used for target recommendation. Critics have argued the use of these AI tools put civilians at risk, blurs accountability, and results in militarily disproportionate violence and violation of international humanitarian law. Not shocking because again AI has no morality, no ethics, and no humanity.

And in completely unrelated news, Open AAI, the company that owns Chat GPT, recently made a deal with the US military for $200 million. The San Francisco based company will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both war fighting and enterprise domains, according to the defenses department posting of awarded contracts. So bear that in mind next time you use chat GPT.

I've also been watching a lot of funy influencer reactions lately. um not the actual influencers themselves, but people reacting and giving information about it. And one influencer couple that I'm seeing a lot is Paul and Morgan. And while I'm not going to get into all the crazy stuff that they say, one thing that I've noticed recently in their videos is Paul casually saying, "I was chat gpting." Not, "I was researching, I was googling, I was looking it up. I was chat gpting it." That really baffles me to use chat GPT on a daily basis to the point that you use it like you use the word googling which I know Google has AI of its own now that's whole problem by itself but using chat GPT to replace Google what can we please not make that a thing can we please not make chat GPTing a thing especially given how consistently it gives out misinformation you should not be using it on a daily basis for your source of information or to talk to it as a friend.

And in these videos, I think one of them, if I remember correctly, he was chat gpting medical information. And while I don't think he was using it as like a resource to decide what to do, I do think he was like just looking up the medical information about his likewise condition on chat gpt. No, no, do not use chat GPT as your source of any kind of medical information. Don't even use it to look up the name of a medical condition that you already know exists. Do not use it for any medical information whatsoever. If you have to use the internet, go to trusted medical websites for this information. And honestly, just go to your doctor if you can. Go to your doctor, ask them questions. Do not rely on the internet if you can go to a doctor. But if you can't, please just use trusted medical websites, trusted reputable websites with medical information. Do not use chat GPT for any medical information because again, chat GPT does not care about you. It doesn't care if it gives you information that would lead to your death. Okay?

And although this video is already incredibly long, I hope you will allow me one last caveat before I conclude this video. AI's impact on art and literature and the workplace. Not only is the constant use of technology shortening the average attention span and making it harder for people to read books, but AI seeks to replace those books altogether with something of its own creation. And a staggering amount of people don't even seem to mind. AI generated stories have weasled their way into websites like AO3, which are dedicated to fanfiction. So, if character AI wasn't enough for you to get your fix, you can also use chat GPT to create an entire story about that character. And many people began to notice all of these AI generated stories popping up. They realized it not just through the fact that there were bits and pieces that were off that were worded incorrectly that made it clear that chat GPT or various forms of AI were used in the creation of these stories, but also because these authors authors were often too lazy to delete chat GPT signature. As I've said, even with school work, students would often not delete the signature from chat GPT. They wouldn't even do the bare minimum to erase evidence of AI, which means that these people were often not even reading the stories that they prompted chat GPT to make. As if it's not bad enough that you were using AI to create fanfiction, something that is supposed to be from the heart. You're not even reading it. Why are you writing it? Writing it. Why are you publishing it? Fanfiction is an outlet for creativity. It exists solely because people fell in love with a piece of media, right? A book, a movie, a TV show, and they loved it so much that they wanted more of it. And so, they went out of their way to create more of it. It's from the heart. When you remove the human aspect of it, you defeat the entire purpose.

But it doesn't end with fanfiction. AI has made its way into the publishing sphere with AI generated covers popping up all over the place and many authors using chat GPT to generate their stories for them. To my knowledge, no traditional publishing company has yet to publish a book made with AI. Although there has been some suspected controversy lately because a couple different authors are in hot water as people read their books and they're so incomprehensible. The only conclusion, well, not the only conclusion, but a big conclusion might be that these were either written or a with AI or were assisted with AI. Alex Aster has been getting heat for her latest release, Sky Shade, which is so ridiculous and unintelligible a lot of people have wondered if AI was used in the creation of it. Another author under fire is Danny Francis, author of Silver Elite. Like Sky Shade, the book is so ridiculous and ever so slightly off in some wordings that it just makes people wonder, was AI used? Even Danny Francis herself, is under suspicion of being AI? Because the name Danny Francis is a pen name, and the author, whoever she may be, has chosen to remain completely anonymous. There is nothing about her out there on the internet which has prompted people to speculate she could be AI, but there's been a bunch of speculation that she could be a varying number of successful authors who maybe have been embroiled in controversies of their own and want a fresh start. So, the rumors span from AI all the way to Colleen Hoover, both of which make a lot of sense to me. But none of these claims are substantiated, and I'm not accusing anyone mentioned here of anything. Okay? I don't know if Alex Aster used AI. I don't know if Danny Franc has used AI. I don't know if she's in AI and dungeon altogether, but these are just things that people are suspicious of. While plenty of self-published authors openly admit to using AI in their work, at this time there is no major publishing company that has yet to use AI in any of their published works, although I imagine it's not too far off in the future.

Generative AI has been massively undercutting the creative world since its inception. Those with little to no originality or creativity of their own choose to use AI to paint themselves a picture or write themselves a story rather than seeking out an actual artist and paying them for these services. Far too many people seem to view this as a good thing. And quite a few generative AI users are all too happy at the idea of using AI to replace artists and pushing them out of their jobs. Even the film industry has made efforts to normalize the use of AI in writing scripts and generating scenes with the hopes of eventually replacing writers and actors and set directors and everything involved in creating a film. None of this is done in the name of artistic innovation, but to cut costs. It is cheaper to give AI a prompt than to hire a professional to do the job. AI art has no soul. It cannot understand the human experience. It can only feain understanding. Nothing AI can do artistically is good enough to replace humans. But major corporations love to cut costs, even at the expense of true artistic expression, and workers who will lose wages and full jobs because of this. Which is why the main players pushing for AI to become normalized are major companies who benefit from replacing man with machine. Do you think Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are pushing AI into every corner of their platforms because they care about you? Do you think it benefits you as an individual or do you think it benefits their bottom line? Do you think the Dolingo owl actually cares if the languages it's teaching you are accurate? That little demon doesn't care if you live or die. Just like the CEOs deciding between paying real humans a livable wage or replacing them with AI.

And probably the most egregious thing about AI in the art world is not that it seeks to steal your job, but that AI actively steals from artists every time it creates a piece of work. Various AI models are trained to create a piece of artwork by being given artwork to duplicate. They put in famous paintings, blah blah blah, but they also take artwork directly from the internet. Just putting in loads and loads of art. The art that you share online is being fed into an AI so it can learn how to replicate your own art style and create its own art from your art. The only reason AI has any ability to create a painting is because it's stealing details from other paintings in order to do so. It's the same with books. It's being fed book after book after book. So, it can take bits and pieces from each of those and put them all together into a new story. It is not creating anything new. It is regurgitating information. Some artists have even been accused of using AI in their art because those AI models have been trained off of their art. So now AI imitates the way their art looks, a style that they've cultivated over years and are now being accused of stealing. AI wouldn't have a leg to stand on if it wasn't allowed to steal from artists and recreate their works. AI is quite literally not creating anything new. It is just stealing from real artists every time it answers a prompt.

A court just ruled that it is perfectly legal for AI tech bros to train their chat bots on copyrighted materials without the author's knowledge or consent like say I don't know millions upon millions of stolen books seems to have ruled on two separate like totally different things. one that it is totally okay for the AI to have been trained on these materials because it falls under the fair use doctrine. And two, again, totally separate, not related differently. Uh the copying and storing of the information so that it could be used to train the AI was illegal. So to reiterate this, it was illegal copyright infringement for Anthropic to scrape book piracy websites for more than 7 million copyrighted books that it then copied and stored to train its AI. That was illegal copyright infringement. But it was totally legal to then use that illegally obtained data to train their AI chatbot that was literally designed to copy these books. Every book in that data set was copied so many times in so many different ways for different uses that Enthropic could not even begin to estimate how many pieces of copyrighted data were in that data set. As far as I can tell, again, as a lay person, the court is ruling on the obtaining of the information and the usage of the information separately. You cannot separate the fact that this was illegally obtained information from the intention and the usage of that illegally obtained information.

When asked about his thoughts on the use of AI in filmm, Wong Carw said, "Technology is just a tool. AI can replicate, but can it yearn? Can AI understand the weight of a glance between two people who can't express their feelings? Can code capture the way memory distorts and reshapes our past?" These are questions that interest me, and I don't think machines have the answers yet. No matter how much AI steals from people to try and replicate what they're doing, it just can't. It can't be a person because it isn't one. And while tons of people sadly show no concern for the artists, the filmmakers, the painters, all of these people who could be put out of work by AI, they're not the only people whose jobs are at risk. 300 million jobs could be lost to AI. AI could force 14% of all workers to change career by 2030. Wall Street expects to replace 200,000 roles with AI in the next 3 to 5 years. 75% of CEOs think generative AI will significantly change their business within the next 3 years. 80% of the US workforce could have at least 10% of their tasks impacted by large language models. 41% of employers worldwide intend to reduce their workforce because of AI in the next 5 years. I'm not trying to fear Monger, but this should scare you. AI is shaping up to impact every aspect of our lives, including the job market. And unless we take major steps towards regulating AI and fighting against companies who want to replace us, this will only get worse.

Because even for those of us who have never used chat GPT a day in our lives, it's nearly impossible to avoid AI everywhere we go. It has taken roots like insidious tweets into everything we do. There's at least one reply under every single tweet that says, "Grock, is this true?" When messaging my friends on Instagram, I'm met with a little button on the side that says, "Write with AI." And when some of my friends send me a message, what shows up above it is summarize with AI. An AI summary of a brief message sent me. Why would I want to read that? Why would I not just read the text that my friend sent me? And of course, there's Google AI, the AI summary that comes up every time you use a Google search, which by the way, if you put a little minus AI at the end of your search, it will get rid of that. But I and a lot of people often forget to do that. And a lot of other people don't even know that you can. But honestly, if I found out someone I was talking to was using AI to summarize the messages that I sent them and was using AI to pan a response to me, I would stop talking to them. Full stop. Like, I don't care. I'm not talking to you anymore. Why are you using AI to message me? I even deleted Duolingo because it's been switching to an AI model. So, not only is a lot of what you're getting, the questions, the answers AI generated, it's becoming more and more inaccurate because they're using AI, which is inaccurate most of the time. It's inescapable. Everywhere you go, AI is there. So, why not just get used to it? Besides the fact that AI doesn't care about you is making you lonelier and dumber is spreading misinformation and wants to take your job. Why should we care? Why shouldn't we just use it when it's so easy and inaccessible?

Because generative AI is also harming the environment. In an article written by Ashton Zaw for MIT News, the computational power required to train generative AI models that often have billions of parameters such as OpenAI's GPT4 can demand a staggering amount of electricity, which leads to increased carbon emissions and pressure on the electricity grid. Beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to cool hardware for training, deploying, and fine-tuning fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain municipal water supplies and disrupt local ecosystems. These increasing numbers of generative AI applications have also spurred demand for high performance computing hardware, adding indirect environmental impacts from its manufacturer and transport. What is different about generative AI is the power density it requires. Fundamentally, it is just computing. But a generative AI training cluster might consume seven or eight times more energy than a typical computing workload, says Norman Basher, lead author of the impact paper. Scientists have estimated that the power requirements of data centers in North America increased from 2,688 megawws at the end of 2022 to 5,341 megawatt at the end of 2023, partly driven by demands of generative AI. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centers rose to 460 terowatts in 2022. This would have made data centers the 11th largest electricity consumers in the world. By 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers is expected to approach a,50 terowatt, which would bump up data centers to fifth place. The power needed to train and deploy a model like OpenAI's GPT3 is difficult to ascertain. In a 2021 research paper, scientists from Google and the University of California at Berkeley estimated the training process alone consumed 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity, enough to power about 120 average US homes for a year, generating about 552 tons of carbon dioxide. The article also states that asking chat GPT a question consumes about five times more electricity than just a regular internet search. Of course, I assume that's without including Google's AI that pops up every single freaking time. Speaking of, here's an AI overview about AI's impact on the environment because I forgot to put in minus AI when I searched this up. AI has a significant environmental impact, including energy consumption, water usage, and e-waste. AI training and data centers use massive amounts of electricity, often generated by fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming. Some say AI's energy demand could reach 10 times its current level by 2026, exceeding a small country's annual electricity consumption.

This is my cold water pressure in the kitchen. This is where I fill up water for storage. Those are the things we have to fill up to flush the toilets. So, you can see the sediment from the data center. Wow. And that's just from the water coming out of your faucet. Yeah. And this is what's in all the pipes. Just the well itself is probably 20,000. And that's not counting any of the all the replacement of the fixtures and fets and toilets and the lines that come underneath the house. It's overwhelming because you you really feel like you are up against this huge wall that you can't penetrate. There's nothing that that you can do. and they don't care. I'm here in Mansfield, Georgia, driving by Meta's new 2 million square foot data center facility. Facilities like this are being used to power things like chat GBT and other AI tools that are becoming integrated into our daily life. Data centers, it's going to be a very hot item. This entire supercomput is built to power gro. We see data centers as the most exciting asset class. Meta is building a 2 gawatt plus data center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. But data centers come with big costs. From light and noise pollution to the environmental impacts to the potential rising costs of energy bills, these facilities put extraordinary demand on the power grid and require entirely new infrastructure. Use of AI is killing the planet. Asking ChatGBT to write one email is the equivalent of pouring out an entire water bottle or powering 14 light bulbs for 1 hour. AI runs on servers kept in hot data centers that need water to cool the equipment. It also requires a lot of energy to run these servers. One chat GBT request requires nearly 10 times as much energy as a Google search. By 2027, AI could use the amount of electricity that Argentina uses in a year. Fossil fuels are the main source of energy used to power AI. Google's greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 48% in the last 5 years due to AI energy demand. So next time you use AI to write an email because you're too lazy or generate an image for a meme, think about the impact on the environment first. The negative environmental impact is hard to overstate, partly because it's hard to ascertain how the demand for AI is going to increase in the coming years, but it certainly seems as though it's going to continue to rise and rise. Chat GPT is apparently the fastest growing app of all time.

[Music] How can we combat this? The first step is to raise awareness. We need to make people aware of the damages of AI on the environment, the workforce, and human development. We need to make people aware that the next generation cannot read and cannot focus. And if we do not acknowledge this, it will only get worse. The next step is to demand change on a systemic level. This might be controversial, but I personally believe that this is not something that can be quashed on an individual level. Yes, there are definitely some individuals who would take on the personal responsibility, but the general public is always going to take the easy way out. The average person is going to use chat GPT to finish their assignments. Because if we leave it up to people individually to be solely responsible for not using chat GPT, for not using AI, for not taking the easy way out, the average person simply won't do it. Grock has 13.8 million tweets. That means 13.8 million times people asked, "Grock, is this true?" Or, you know, asked it to make really inappropriate images of total strangers. And chat GPT receives about 5.2 million visits each month. Each month with about 800 million active weekly users. Do you think every single one of those 800 million users has no idea about the dangers of AI on the environment on people? They definitely do and a lot of them don't care because they will take the easy way out no matter what. Who cares about the long-term effects when the short-term effects are so good?

The third step is regulating AI. This falls really in line with the second step which is to demand change on a systemic level because that change should be regulations. This technology fallen into the hands of the few who love to use anything they can get their hands on for wicked intent is dangerous. The people who will use this to spread propaganda. The people who will use this to generate disgusting images of people without their consent. The people who lurk on the corner of the internets who are usually called trolls who will argue with you if you disagree about their really insane opinions on vaccines should not have completely unregulated access to generative AI. What's stopping any government out there from creating propaganda to make you agree with whatever it is they're doing at this exact moment? What's to stop any individual from creating revenge porn after someone breaks up with them or rejects them? What's to stop someone from using AI to completely fabricate stories of, "Oh, this person lied to me. Look at them lying to me. Look at the text. Look at the videos of them saying this." The average person or really anyone should not have unregulated access to generative AI. It is dangerous. Besides the effect it's having on our cognitive functions, besides how dangerous it can be for the next generation to not know how to read to answer their assignments, it is just dangerous for people to have complete free use of all of this. So in short, acknowledge there's a problem and demand change. And while I said I don't believe this change can fully be done on an individual level and it needs to be done on a systemic level, I do believe there are changes we can make individually. Hello. I do believe there are changes we can make individually to help. First of all, if you're using AI, if you're using chat GPT, cut that out of your life if you can. Stop relying on it for your everyday information. Stop using it to generate images and stories and answers. Stop using it to finish your assignments for you or to study with it because it's not helping you. It's not helping you graduate. It's not helping you learn. So, cut AI out of your own life if you can and make your loved ones who are using it aware of the problems it will cause in their lives if you can. And if we truly want to implement change on a systemic level, we have to be individually willing to demand that. If we aren't willing to get louder and bolder than the people who live in willful ignorance about the dangers of AI, I'm afraid we will be very quickly overtaken. Those numbers are already shifting. Literacy rates are plummeting and the use of AI is skyrocketing. And the only way to change that is for that change to go all the way to the top. What good will it do if you don't use AI? if when you go to the doctor, your doctor graduated using AI and now they don't even know how to diagnose you with something as simple as the common cold. Because what good is it going to do if you vow to never use chat GPT, but the company you work for chooses to replace you with AI anyway?

If you're watching this video and you have kids, you are raising the next generation. And you need to work proactively to protect their education and development, not just from AI, but from doom scrolling and Coco Melon and all of these things that seek to reduce their attention span to the size of a pee. At home, make sure your kids are being taught to live their lives off of social media. Make sure that they can read without getting distracted because they're not going to be able to do this in school. They're not going to be able to read a book, pay attention to what the teacher is saying. If anytime they get a little rowdy, you stick a tablet in front of their face. Make sure they are ready and capable of absorbing information at school. And make sure the school you send them to is actually giving them an education and not saying, "It's okay. You don't need to read. If you have a crappy attention span, we're not going to do anything about it. You can go to the next grade." I may get he for saying this, but annoy the crap out of your local school board. Okay? Your kid's education is at risk here. I'm not advocating for you to try to make your kids' life harder, but I am advocating for you to take personal responsibility for your kids' education to help them improve and learn more. So, if you need to go to your schoolboard and say, "These kids need to learn how to read and they're not doing that." Tell them that. Every person out there who values education and basic brain function should be actively fighting against these policies that discourage children from getting proper educations. Policies that are not stopping people from using AI to do absolutely everything in their lives. And the policies that are encouraging schools to just pass the kid on to the next grade level no matter what.

[Music] If you made it this far, you're probably saying to yourself, "Surely AI can't be all bad. Surely there have to be some positives." And you would be right. There are forms of AI out there that are accurately and effectively detecting cancer early on in cancer patients. AI does have its uses, but only when it's well regulated and being used within proper parameters. It is not the mere existence of AI that is harmful and dangerous. Because we know AI has good uses. It is the unregulated use of generative AI that is harming people because the kind of AI that is detecting cancer is not the same kind of AI that is generating images of people without their consent or becoming your boyfriend. But nonetheless, AI still needs to be regulated. Because while on one side of the coin forms of AI are making great medical advancements, on the other side of the coin is melting the ice caps, spreading more propaganda and threatening to turn the next generation into the most thoughtless and detached generation ever. And it also threatens to create the most cynical generation. Because if you can't tell what's real from what's deep fakes, what does it matter? If everything is true, nothing is true. If nothing is true, everything is true. You are creating a generation of nihilists that are passive in their own destruction. Unless you want the future to look like Wall-E, where the Earth has become uninhabitable and humans have become adult iPad babies, changes need to be made right now. Mankind is well known for turning anything it can into a weapon. And while you may never use chat GPT, you may be lucky enough to never have AI revenge porn made of you. You may have job security. You may be even wise enough to never fall for any deep fix. But none of that can protect you from the environmental impact of AI because that will affect every single person on this planet. I want the next generation to be safe and healthy. I want them to have a planet to live on and I want them to understand how to take care of that planet and of themselves. I want the next generation to be well educated and happy. And we are headed dangerously fast towards a future where that is not plausible. And I know it seems counterintuitive to spend this incredibly long time talking about how our attention spans are dying. I have a lot to say on this subject. I think it's really important. I think the decisions being made in the coming years on education, on AI, will impact all of us, the next generation, and the generation after that. If changes are not made soon, it's not looking good. As someone who grew up in the age of technology and grew up in an environment that did not foster intellectualism or literacy, I know firsthand how it can impact you. I know firsthand how my addiction to my phone has altered my brain chemistry. I know firsthand how if you were not taught literacy, it is a real struggle to learn it later on. And some people aren't even aware that they haven't been taught it. They don't understand that they lack understanding. And I know all of this is reversible. I know it is not too late to put your phone down and do things to improve your memory retention and overall brain function. I know it is not too late to pick up a book and learn how to understand the text. But you have to know that these are things that you need to be doing. You need to be made aware of it.

A very interesting thing about this cultural and societal moment we're in where we're realizing that people don't have reading comprehension skills, like very basic reading comprehension skills, is that people forget part of reading comprehension is being able to infer the intended audience of a piece of text without the author telling you directly. You're supposed to be able to engage with a piece of text and say, "I think the intended audience is blank." You are not supposed to need clarifications at the beginning of a text saying, "Now, obviously I'm not talking about ABC, B, C, and D." You're supposed to be able to figure that out on your own, right? And so when you request those clarifications of saying, "Now, make sure you say you're not talking about X, Y, and Z group. You lack reading comprehension skills." It is not too late for you. It is not too late for the kids in school now who are struggling to pay attention in class and read the classics or read anything at all. It is not too late to make sure the next generation gets the education they deserve. And I choose for my own sanity. It is not too late to regulate AI and stop it from infiltrating every aspect of our world. I choose for my own sanity to believe that is the case because the only way to actually make these changes is to believe that they are possible and work towards them. The only way we are going to stop the decline in literacy is to acknowledge that there's a decline and make efforts to reverse it. The only way we are going to stop AI is to acknowledge the damage it is doing to our brains, to our jobs, to our environment and make efforts to reverse it.

[Music] I don't mean for this video to be a huge downer. I just think it's important to raise awareness that this is actually happening. And again, I just don't think it's possible to talk about the declining literacy rates without talking about how students implemented chat GPT and AI and all of their assignments is contributing to that. And it's impossible to make a definitive video on how AI is infiltrating every corner of our society without mentioning how it's infiltrating our schools. And even if you are aware of this and you're just watching this video for fun, I hope it was informative and interesting and maybe I did a good enough job that if you have any relatives and friends who are wondering, well, what's the big deal? You can show them this video. If not, there's plenty of other really great videos out there that have been made on these topics that you can also share with people who don't understand the dangers of AI and the problems that are very quickly arising in the next generation that are simply not being taught the basics anymore. And if you made it this far, thank you so so much for sticking around. I truly appreciate it. I cannot put into words how much I appreciate the amount of love and support I've received from my channel this past week, these past few weeks really. Ever since I started my channel only two weeks ago, I have received so many positive comments and feedback and it has been so wonderful and I've had so so much fun making all of these videos for you guys and I hope that I can continue to do that in the future. And if you want me to continue to do that in the future, please like and subscribe, leave a comment, maybe even share and copy link to boost in the algorithm. And if you want to show a little extra support, my Kofi is going to be linked below. Uh because August, my birthday's coming up in August and I am very quickly approaching being 27 with no money, no prospects, already a burden to my parents and frightened. I'm 27 years old. I have no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents and I'm frightened. So, if you want to make at least one of those things not true, uh you can donate as little as a dollar to help me out. If you are not financially capable of helping me out of donating, please do not worry about it. Do not even bother donating a dollar. If you don't have money, if you are struggling, I am not here to take money from other people who need that money. But if you happen to have a little extra lying around and you just want to donate 1 5 $10, that would mean the absolute world to me. But admittedly, anytime someone donates to my Kofi, I feel a little guilty. I got a $10 donation recently from a very, very lovely person and I wanted to cry when I saw it because I was so happy and I felt so much guilt that I had taken $10 from somebody. So, I have to plug my Kofi. I do, but please do not feel any pressure whatsoever to donate anything. I do have prints available for free on there and you're more than willing to just take the prints and go. And I am working on scanning all of my artwork, getting higher quality prints so you can have even better quality pictures and more variety to choose from. But right now, I have three pictures up there and I'm working on more. But I've just been having so much fun with this channel. And truly, if you made it this far, I appreciate it so much because I know I do not have a melodious voice. It's probably been difficult for you to get through this. Um, and I am doing my best to work on getting my videos better, um, speaking better, you know. uh enunciating more uh better lighting angles. The angles constantly changed throughout this video because I was trying out new things and not all of them worked out. But I was doing my best to read my script and look at the camera and speak speak clearly and all of that stuff. Um and hopefully I'll get better at it in the future. There is a learning curve and I am working on it. So bear with me and thank you guys so so so much. But That's all, folks. Thank you and good night. Bye-bye. Why are you still drinking water? Like, we need that for AI and you're just wasting it.

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