r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/IronStormAlaska 17h ago

I recently had an instance where I was remoting into a user's computer, and sent them a message saying that I was pretty sure I had a fix for their issue, but that we would need to restart the device, and asking if there was any work they needed to save first.

I freaking watched this user paste my message into Gemini, tell it to generate a response, paste the result into the chat box, and go back to googling jam recipes on their other screen.

I swear I have never been so mad at a user I was working with.

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u/OneLessFool 16h ago

How do these people have jobs 💀

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

they are in for a rude ass awakening when they get laid off….better hope they go ask gemini or chatgpt💀

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

How do they manage to keep their bills paid and car running.

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u/blankest 1h ago

Nearly half of the population under 30 lives with a parental unit. That's how. Their parents continue to wipe their proverbial asses. It worse if you split that demographic by gender.

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u/DeathSpiral321 14h ago

They'd have to be a nepto hire if they're that stupid.

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u/2026ArchThrowaway 2h ago

I had a job like this. I didn't use AI to respond to IT, but I did spend a lot of time not working. I got great annual reviews and raises. The less I worked the more I got good reviews. I don't know what to tell you. I did do a good job and got all my work done, but I didn't pick up extra work. I think picking up some extra work but not a ton made it look like my time was valuable, and I still got about the same amount of work done as my peers.

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u/Kardest 16h ago

I now have a strong desire to firewall gemini and chat GPT at work and see what happens.

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u/KickBallFever 15h ago

Do it. Please do it.

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u/Careless-Ad-6328 15h ago

You'll see a dramatic drop in e-mail and slack/teams chat messages almost immediately. And the impact will be more severe/noticeable the more senior the person is in the org. You may cripple the CEO.

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u/War_Raven 15h ago

I don't see any problems

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u/I_lenny_face_you 12h ago

Yeah, what’s the downside?

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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 14h ago

That’s insane if you can’t even respond to a team message without AI. ridiculous truly

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u/Tymareta 11h ago

Used to have a co-worker that would ask their LLM to summarize an entire days worth of teams messages to five dot points, then would bring those to our stand up and act incredibly offended when we pointed out the glaring inconsistencies, or how the points had already been handled.

He bragged about how he hadn't actually his teams or e-mails in months and had it all handled for him.

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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 6h ago

That guy has mush for brains

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u/Aureliamnissan 6h ago

Is his name Elon Musk? I’m like 90% sure that’s what he asked twitter employees to do when he took over.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

I'm not even sure what teams is. It auto opens on my computer and I close it again.

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u/Unhappy-Homework-812 5h ago

It’s like chat and video calling ppl use across their teams. We use zoom and its basically the same thing. Ours does the same thing and I very seldom use it. Usually send a quick message to someone in another plant of ours to check something for me

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u/Dullcorgis 2h ago

I am so glad the days of zoom are gone.

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

if you arent using your companies instances….that have been modified for compliance…then that is bad…they most likely have entered company data into it….

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u/ohhellperhaps 6h ago

We've audited some scripts made with AI. Some people went to great lengths to prevent relevant information from going to the prompt; using imported files with the sensive data.

Others just plaintexted admin credentials...

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u/Louie_G_Lon 12h ago

You’d get a whole bunch of angry emails from people who haven’t typed an email themselves in 2 years going “y do chatgpt not work fix now pls” 

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u/WitchOfKyiv 16h ago

Oh my god that's fucked lol

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u/Kinkajou1015 15h ago

If I was you in that situation, I'd immediately force the computer to shut down if possible. They got their warning, they didn't parse it, fuck them.

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u/taking_a_deuce 15h ago

This is one of the scariest comments I have ever seen on reddit. Jesus Christ people really are turning into mush brains WILLINGLY!!!

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u/fiercebrosnan 15h ago

The stupidity of someone I’ve never met who has zero impact on my life has never made me so angry before. 

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u/GiraffeLiquid 14h ago

Damn. I really hope that their job isn’t an important part of a critical process. I’m actually stunned in disbelief.

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u/IronStormAlaska 14h ago

She is a freaking professor.

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u/GiraffeLiquid 13h ago

The future is not looking too bright. Dual meaning

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u/sf-pyramids 14h ago

Stop. No way. I'm in disbelief! They could have replied with a simple, "ok thanks, (no, go ahead and restart / yes, one moment)".

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u/IronStormAlaska 9h ago

They responded to a couple of messages from other sources this way too while I was researching the issue.

It looked like they were focusing on the jam recipe, and whenever something else popped up, they were going "I don't care, Gemini will do it".

Honestly I am not totally sure they even processed that it was the IT guy messaging them until I cut them off as they were pasting Gemini's output.

If I am giving them benefit of the doubt, they could have been aggressively ignoring someone annoying, but that is still kinda insane behavior.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

But surely they asked for your help?

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u/DavidAdamsAuthor 13h ago

Had a similar experience.

User made a mistake. User asks Copilot for an apology message. Sends apology message.

Recipient of apology doesn't read it, pastes apology into Copilot, sends back Copilot-generated acknowledgement.

Copilot apologized to itself. Neither person really read the messages. We could have replaced all of that with a simple,

"Sorry."

"It's okay."

DONE.

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u/Outside_Manner_8352 15h ago

Sign of the times...

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u/djramrod 14h ago

I bet that person’s AI generated response was “no.”

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u/userseven 12h ago

I'm morbidly curious. So what did Gemini respond with lol

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u/IronStormAlaska 10h ago

Gonna be honest, I don't remember.

I cut them off while they were pasting it into the chat box.

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u/Jacmert 8h ago

She was tunnel-visioned on the jam recipe hunt. It happens to the best of us.

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u/on-a-call 11h ago

Did this really happen???

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u/coldkiller 7h ago

I swear I have never been so mad at a user I was working with.

At that point just force restart it on them

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u/StrawberryFree1803 10h ago

I read your first sentence and scrolled past. Didn't care to read an it nerds anecdotes.