Simply seeing our culture being dumbed-down is worrying enough. So too the creation of a people who are so obsessed with images and gadgets and technological marvels that basics like thinking, reflecting, reading and writing are increasingly being lost.

I have said it before: I am old, and I am old school. So things like AI leave me a bit cold, and I believe that for all the benefits it may confer, there may be as many—if not more—downsides and even dangers. Numerous articles are found on this site warning of many of the negatives of things like AI, transhumanism and the like.

Yes, in areas like medicine, there have already been many helpful developments via AI. So I am not a gung-ho Luddite. And my interests here have more to do with things like learning and teaching, reading and writing. Many folks, including educators and lecturers, have been sounding the alarm about AI in our schools and elsewhere.

In a recent piece I noted how very widespread cheating is now becoming because of AI. While things like plagiarism have always been with us, they are getting much, much worse today. See that article here.

I am not alone in my concerns. One social media friend seems to be just like me: old and old school! A few days ago in the social media philosopher and lecturer Douglas Groothuis posted this:

Who would you respect more for his or her talent?
1. Someone good at fantasy sports online or a genuine athlete in baseball or volleyball or golf who has the physical skill and goes out and plays the game?
2. Mutatis mutandis, who do you respect more: Someone who researches and writes his or her articles, essays, reviews, and books or someone who does so with AI?

In the piece I just linked to above he also said this:

AI and Writing: Many Questions
How many in the upcoming generation will learn how to write as genuine authors? Will they learn grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, and rhetoric? Will they receive wisdom from exemplary authors of both substance and style, such as C. S. Lewis? Will they master the apt turn of phrase, the proper word choice, the art of sentence construction and paragraphing? Will they know the subtle difference between a semicolon and a comma, between a semicolon and a period? Will they know how to document quotations and ideas? Will the footnote survive? Will they know how to self-edit and edit others’ work? Or will their personality expressed through writing, their authorship, be outsourced to AI? If so, it is literary suicide (with a happy AI face).

I fully agree. Over-reliance on things like AI, ChatGPT and the like may well be creating a generation of people who are more or less illiterate, unable to carefully think and reflect, and unable to properly express themselves. They simply rely on machines to do all this for them.

And in an ‘instant everything’ culture we know this will continue to deteriorate. Given the importance of the written word (just consider the Bible for example), the move away from reading, writing and thinking skills can only further worsen.

Many perceptive commentators have been warning about such things for years now. Back in 2003 Arthur Hunt penned an important volume called The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World (Crossway). Let me again quote from it:

So what is going on here? We spend more time than ever reading texts, social media, and email—so why wouldn’t we be reading books, too? Well, a recent survey by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span is now a vanishingly brief eight seconds, down from twelve seconds in the year 2000. As the New York Times memorably put it, we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

When it comes to reading anything longer than a 140-character tweet, our ability to concentrate has plummeted. Be honest, now: How difficult is it for you to get through a half-hour Bible study without succumbing to the urge to check Facebook? It’s gotten so bad that Cal Newport proposed last month in the Times that fellow millennials take a radical step to save their careers: and quit social media.

Services like Facebook and Twitter weaken our ability to concentrate, he writes, because they’re “engineered to be addictive. The more you use social media throughout your waking hours, the more your brain learns to crave a quick hit of stimulus at the slightest hint of boredom.”

Now, I don’t think quitting social media is the answer for most people, but Newport has a point. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg is also right to compare our virtual world of constantly-updated snippets with pre-literate cultures where information was transmitted orally. In a society without writing or books, he explains, ideas had to be short, pithy, and memorable—in other words, “viral.”

Reaching Others, or Accommodating Them?

Times change of course. But biblical truth does not. So sometimes as we seek to share unchanging truth to a changing culture, we may need to adopt to these new situations and make some changes here and there. But there are limits to this. Given that this post is mainly about thinking and writing and the like, let me offer a few examples.

Every now and then I will get someone complaining that I write too much or that my articles are too long. This of course reflects a few recent changes. One, our culture—and that includes Christian culture—is increasingly being dumbed down. The old virtues of careful thought, deep reflection, and being well-read, are being jettisoned big time.

Along with this are our ever-shortened attention spans. In an image-rich and thought-poor culture that demands immediate satisfaction, people have a hard time sitting through lots of things, be it a ‘long’ article or a ‘long’ sermon.

People in the pews get antsy if a sermon goes beyond 20 minutes—they are already reaching for their car keys and thinking about lunch, or the afternoon football game (which they CAN manage to sit through for hours!). No wonder so many churches today are offering very short pep talks instead of serious sermons and biblical exposition.

But the issue here is this: do we just cave in to these changes, dumbing ourselves down in the process? Or do we seek to wisely counter these unhelpful trends, and set a standard of excellence? I know which option I prefer. Simply surrendering to the cultural decline all around us is not how we are going to reach the culture.

If we give in to every change for the worse in the surrounding culture, we will not be in a position to help it for the better. Let me get back to the critics I referred to just above. Should we just pander to where folks are now at in the hopes of better reaching them?

Well, in some obvious ways we should. Relying on old King James English when trying to reach young people today might be rather silly and counterproductive. Demanding that they must only read from actual Bibles, and not Bible apps or what have you is also unnecessary.

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