Nowadays, it seems like most students just study for the credentials, not out of curiosity about the content. Since every exam or term paper is just an obstacle on the way to graduation, everything is done with the minimal amount of effort. It was nearly the same when I started at university around 20 years ago. We just used other methods as AI was not available.
Yes, the fall of higher education has been happening for some time, and it really has become nothing more than a diploma mill and usury scheme. It bears no resemblance to how universities operated in past times. K-12 education on the whole is pretty much worthless too and serves the purpose of a daycare in most cases. Personally, I oppose compulsory education, because I suspect it does more harm than good for most children now. On a related note, I suspect our literacy rates are actually far lower than what the statistics show.
In Germany, the usury scheme is not as promiment as in the USA, but then we also don´t have any elite university which would be worth a lot of money to attend. In my area of expertise, you basically have to have a PhD to get a reasonably good job, which means that a high percentage of graduates have a PhD. This makes every lower academic degree basically worthless.
I am not completely opposed to compulsory education, even though I have read Ivan Illich´s work on this topic and somehow agree with him. When I listen to the stories my mother told me about her time in school and also about how school was, when my grandfather was attending it, it sounds really good. The pupils came out of school with a lot of confidence instead of the current combination of fatigue and relief (only to get into nearly the same system at university). Something went wrong around the 1970ies. I am not sure what, but the flooding of good schools and universities with mediocre people could be a reason.
Great article, it's spot on. I came for the AI Art portion but enjoyed your commentary on the other aspects too. I agree that the sensational aspects are getting all the attention, but the mundane aspects are where the real rather than hypothetical danger lies. The internet is already diluted, and clogged with hack work, and click bait. Making content generation easier isn't necessarily good, because it means that people can now say many things that aren't worth taking the time to say.
To the extent that the medium is the message, how an image is created makes a statement about how worthwhile the image was to say. I figure if someone really has something important to say they can take the time to compose it, paint it, and or go out, arrange or wait for the right lighting and photograph it. If it wasn't worth the image maker's time to say it themselves through actually creating or capturing the image themself it's probably not worth our time to look at it. Same goes for AI writing, if it's not worth someone's time to write it so they use AI, it's likely not worth anyone else's time to read it.
Thank you for your kind words! And I couldn't agree more on your latter point about the process of AI reflecting its lack of quality. I refuse to call AI generated images "art," personally.
Nowadays, it seems like most students just study for the credentials, not out of curiosity about the content. Since every exam or term paper is just an obstacle on the way to graduation, everything is done with the minimal amount of effort. It was nearly the same when I started at university around 20 years ago. We just used other methods as AI was not available.
Yes, the fall of higher education has been happening for some time, and it really has become nothing more than a diploma mill and usury scheme. It bears no resemblance to how universities operated in past times. K-12 education on the whole is pretty much worthless too and serves the purpose of a daycare in most cases. Personally, I oppose compulsory education, because I suspect it does more harm than good for most children now. On a related note, I suspect our literacy rates are actually far lower than what the statistics show.
In Germany, the usury scheme is not as promiment as in the USA, but then we also don´t have any elite university which would be worth a lot of money to attend. In my area of expertise, you basically have to have a PhD to get a reasonably good job, which means that a high percentage of graduates have a PhD. This makes every lower academic degree basically worthless.
I am not completely opposed to compulsory education, even though I have read Ivan Illich´s work on this topic and somehow agree with him. When I listen to the stories my mother told me about her time in school and also about how school was, when my grandfather was attending it, it sounds really good. The pupils came out of school with a lot of confidence instead of the current combination of fatigue and relief (only to get into nearly the same system at university). Something went wrong around the 1970ies. I am not sure what, but the flooding of good schools and universities with mediocre people could be a reason.
Great article, it's spot on. I came for the AI Art portion but enjoyed your commentary on the other aspects too. I agree that the sensational aspects are getting all the attention, but the mundane aspects are where the real rather than hypothetical danger lies. The internet is already diluted, and clogged with hack work, and click bait. Making content generation easier isn't necessarily good, because it means that people can now say many things that aren't worth taking the time to say.
To the extent that the medium is the message, how an image is created makes a statement about how worthwhile the image was to say. I figure if someone really has something important to say they can take the time to compose it, paint it, and or go out, arrange or wait for the right lighting and photograph it. If it wasn't worth the image maker's time to say it themselves through actually creating or capturing the image themself it's probably not worth our time to look at it. Same goes for AI writing, if it's not worth someone's time to write it so they use AI, it's likely not worth anyone else's time to read it.
Thank you for your kind words! And I couldn't agree more on your latter point about the process of AI reflecting its lack of quality. I refuse to call AI generated images "art," personally.