Eryk Salvaggio, Cybernetic Forests: “Something I Can Tell Students Now That I Am Not Teaching. You and I probably both keep hearing that students should be working toward AI literacy. That you should know what to type into prompt windows, because it will save you time. That will get you jobs in the economy of tomorrow, where I guess typing into a window to save time will be a valuable skill. What do you type into the boxes? That’s AI literacy. There’s more to it, of course: how to make sense of what comes out of the box. But how about this one: Why do you type into the boxes? That’s human literacy. You can’t have AI literacy without it, but we’ve set much of that aside over the last few decades. Nobody really asks why we are asking you to cut and paste clusters of words between windows, where the sentences will be elongated by a machine for you to paste somewhere else. You might be copying and pasting things between windows one day and get stuck on this question of why. What is the point of this work? Why is it rewarded and incentivized? You may start looking at corporate decision making and find something that makes you cynical. You may think that this skill set, AI literacy, isn’t helping you with that cynicism. There is a basic answer, which is that if you don’t know how writing or image-making or coding works, you won’t be able to understand what the AI is doing and where you might be able to make something of your own out of whatever it gives you. That’s AI literacy and human literacy working together…But human literacy is more than what happens in the workplace of the future…
Human literacy is quite helpful, though, because living a life consciously — with real connection to interpreting and creating the poetic for whatever it is that life sets in front of us — is a far more important skill for life satisfaction than slotting words correctly for a chatbot…”
See also AI slop and the destruction of knowledge.
