I recently came across an article “Is Google Making Us Stupid” where it talks about how people are hopping from Pages to Pages and people inability to learn from long articles and books. As the result of the same companies are moving from in depth long form contents to short crisp content. The same can been seen in the space of video consumption as well where video lengths are shrinking and hence resulting in the rise of short video apps like TikTok, YT Shorts and IG Reels. But with the advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the form of Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Bard the playing field has changed entirely as these provide access to information in the way which was not available to any generation before.

Humanity is generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data everyday and it is not possible for any human brain to process that amount of data even in his lifetime. Hence tools like ChatGPT and Bard is helping humans find relevant information from the quintillion bites of data. But what does this doing to us and how its different from the google generation is that while using google there was only the information that was served to us on the silver plater but there was some thinking involved in the interpretation of the information but when we talk about ChatGPT and other LLMs they have also taken up the task of interpreting the information which limit the thinking of an individual. Let’s look at an example, when you search for “How to grow a plant” on google you are presented with thousands of articles on the same and you go through 4 or 5 of them and you are presented with different ideas and some extra information about what nutrients are needed for plants. This not only force you think which method will be best for you but also expand your knowledge about the nitty-gritty of the growing of plants. But when you ask ChatGPT about the same it will give you the best way to grow a plant based on the conditions you specified in the prompt. This limits your ability to learn about the other methods and not expand your knowledge about plant growing.

Now, what’s the solution to this problem? Should we outrightly ban the development of LLMs? These questions can come in your mind. But is it the right approach? Maybe not, with a huge amount of data generated in the world we need some tools to interpret it and derive meaningful insights from the data. But this does not mean that every time you need an information you should jump to ChatGPT and other LLMs. You should refer different sources of information like books and online articles and use ChatGPT and other LLMs only when you need to get the information instantly. Also, there has been an increasing trend of using this tool to cheat on tests and projects. This should not be the way we use the tools given to us and as the projects and test given to us are focused on expanding our knowledge and not to test the knowledge of ChatGPT and LLMs.