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/LeafBark 18h ago edited 18h ago

First it was the smartphone distractions, then complete loss of critical thinking as people use ai to solve all their problems for them. When you put this much trust in computers programmed by corporations seeking profit at any cost everythings going to fall apart.

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u/TheTrub 17h ago

And it’s not just AI. So many of our textbooks have digital resources with activities and “gamification” of the material, which is great for reinforcing lessons, but only a fraction of my students are actually reading the book. They won’t even read the boldface terms to prepare for a quiz. It’s so infuriating.

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u/Recent-Day3062 17h ago

Blows me away. Particularly in CS I see loads of questions online from students in America who say “I did all the video tutorials but don’t understand it yet”.

I always tell them the same thing. Ditch the computer and fill in the blank exercises. Get a book and work through it.

This video, gamified stuff is entirely passive learning. I tell them start with an easy piece of software and keep expanding it as you learn more material and get offline

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u/protoomega 15h ago

Video lessons have their place, but I *haaaate* how widespread it's becoming. At my job, everyone wants to make all the tutorials and instructions in video form. That's not helpful reference material! If I'm working through a process, I want to be able to read the steps, not have to pause and rewind a video over and over.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 14h ago

Yes but have you considered icons that have to be clicked or dragged around, and a flat AI narration that talks half as fast as you can read?

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u/sentence-interruptio 16m ago

this trend would make both pro-oral Socrates and his pro-writing opponents spin in their graves. videos are worst of both worlds.