The Illiterate Generation
America is paying by the month to raise a cohort of endorphin-addled cheaters chatbot-ing their way to meaningless diplomas
One of the best-read columns at The What For was a coping mechanism as I dropped my oldest off at college and compared it to the osprey parents I watch leave their young on the Chesapeake Bay. My little bird swooped back by the nest for fall break yesterday and made two bold announcements: home is not quite home anymore and chatbots have overtaken college.
I will compartmentalize the former conclusion for the time being and deal with the latter. She reports, with alarm, that way too many college students are using A.I. chatbots for literally everything, from getting summaries of readings in lieu of doing readings, to generating thesis statements or rough draft answers, to writing entire papers. I confirmed this with a professor friend, who has begun doing oral final exams, one-on-one, in lieu of written work to dodge the cloud of chatbot assistance.
This is a crisis we should have seen coming. We already knew our kids were carrying a mental weapon in their pockets, so why are we agnostic about the ammunition they load?
The old saying goes like this: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. This is twice. Will we really let artificial intelligence chatbots retard the development of intelligence the same way we let social media pre-wire teen mental health?
The public has reluctantly reached the consensus we gave the children of the country smartphones, with social media capability, too early in life. Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation, has been one of the most consequential books of the decade, spending 52 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sparking legislation restricting youth phone use across America and all the way to Australia. If Oprah Winfrey and Sarah Huckabee Sanders agree on something, we should take note, and they both pushed Haidt’s thesis, with Sanders, the Governor of Arkansas, implementing a social media age restriction for kids under 16.
The grass-roots group Wait Til 8th, founded by two professional moms in Austin, has long encouraged parents of young kids to take a formal pledge to withhold smartphones from their kids until they turn 14 and hit 8thgrade. The group notes that many tech industry leaders in Silicon Valley made that same choice for their own kids, knowing that smartphones are addictive, impair sleep, compete with academics, and most importantly physically change the brains of heavy users.
When our kids got old enough to earn some neighborhood independence, we got a burner flip phone they could use to call us from the park – but they found it too embarrassing to carry. We held our ground, then once they got a phone at 14, social media still had to wait a bit. The rigor was not perfect, as we are not, but it helped. Passing through adolescence is fraught with enough peril as it is, with the body’s changing chemistry without layering in the stress of the entire world, and the precise knowledge of every social snub and sneer.
The challenge of chatbots is more severe, and its confluence with the last decade which The Atlantic calls “the worst in the history of American education” elevates the risk into a looming national catastrophe. We are creating a generation of endorphin-addled illiterate fools and paying by the month for the unlimited data plans and app subscriptions to do it – all while the edu-crats give them passing grades and keep cashing the tuition checks.
ChatGPT was just unveiled in 2022. Claude.ai, CoPilot and Google’s Gemini rolled out in 2023. The lost reading comprehension, analytical, and critical thinking skills we will eventually trace to their ubiquity have not yet registered in education test scores, but the baseline was already suffering from pandemic learning loss, social media, and distracted priorities within the education establishment, burdened by a monotheistic worship of intersectional politics.
How bad is it? Idrees Kahloon sets the stage in The Atlantic:
“We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.”
This erosion of skills was nearly nationwide, with the exception of Mississippi, which will be the subject of a future column at The What For. Today’s middle schoolers are heading to high school with reading and math scores that have not been lower since the 1970s, and on top of that we have put a device each of their backpacks that ensures they have a cheat code to stay stupid.
A.I. is going to make its way into every corner of our lives and in many cases, it will make it better. Surgeons and engineers having the capability to test billions of scenarios before making decisions seems like a good thing. Seventeen-year-olds having the ability to skip the reading of Macbeth seems tragic. It will take a society-wide commitment to address this, and it will have to happen before these kids who are hooked on the juice can out-vote those of us who grew up reading and thinking for ourselves.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a prophet about the ills of Big Tech many times in the past, initiating the government ban on TikTok as a freshman senator and being the first state Attorney General to go after Google’s malfeasance in his first office, has one good idea. Hawley is circulating draft legislation to make chatbot use illegal for minors, with the tech companies responsible for verifying ages.
States like Virginia, following Gov. Sanders’ lead in Arkansas, are banning cell phone use, bell-to-bell, in schools. These are all good starts. Tech companies should embrace these bans as reasonable restrictions and they should do what social media companies would not – and be forces for good before they are hauled into court to face class action suits from their products’ harm. And colleges – which are all adopting anti-A.I. policies that their students are flouting – should elevate chatbot use to an academic fraud offense that carries expulsion.
America needs to be the world’s leader in developing artificial intelligence, not the world’s guinea pig in using it to replace judgement.
Editor’s Note: Sen. Josh Hawley has been one our clients at OnMessage Inc. since he entered politics as a candidate for Missouri Attorney General.
The Ospreys: The column I reference in the first graph is SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO, from August, when I left my baby girl alone in a brand new nest. It’s the third most-read column at The What For. Check it out and empathize with my pain.
The Pivot To Video: Technology was the subject of my other column this week, SURRENDER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES. As a recovering journalist, I spend a lot of time doing media critique and observing media trends, to the irritation of some of my acquaintances in the business. You can find my media critiques often in my Twitter account - @BradOnmessage.
The Archive: There are more than 50 columns at The What For website. If you enjoyed this one, you might like to peruse the vault for a few others. The leaderboard can guide you to the pieces that got the most traction if you' are in a hurry. Otherwise, set a spell and dive in - and give me feedback in the chat.
