I remember childhood vividly, even though the last few years of my life are beginning to blur together. I remember growing up in a phoneless, Wi-Fi-less, AI-less world. Afternoons were for heavy lunches and naps, followed by many hours of playing downstairs with my society friends. Nights, of course, were for reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. Summers were cooler, the air was light, people were nicer—everything was just better back then.
My earliest memories of being online lie within those golden years. I remember the big, boxy PC in my house that I had to learn how to operate myself when I was just seven. It had a dial-up internet connection and would take five minutes to switch on. I would get one hour of computer time every day, in which I would somehow manage to read articles, watch music videos and play video games.
My screentime began to increase when my mum got a touchscreen phone, a black and orange Samsung Corby that I would steal every chance I got. Then came an iPad, my cousin’s laptop, and, when I was in fifth grade, my neighbour’s Wi-Fi. But it was truly game over a few years later when I got my first phone at 13. I would stay up all night reading on Wattpad, pirating movies and scrolling through Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter. Now, I write, read, watch, talk, learn, even exist at times, completely online.
Despite that fact, I think I can say that my generation was the last generation to enjoy a normal childhood. ChatGPT only became a thing in my first year of college. I was an English literature student, and I remember how my teachers’ faces grew longer and longer at the insidious program infiltrating all our lessons. By the second year, they had given up. No matter how much they forbade and begged and cajoled, students continued to use ChatGPT for simple assignments, outsourcing all their thinking to a machine starved for information. A visible result of this was highly decreased participation in the classroom—my peers would dry up when asked a question on the spot. By the end of the third year, I could only observe as some of my classmates, who had studied and written papers entirely using AI, were awarded the same degree I was.
That was two years ago. Today, working, studying and even living without AI doesn’t seem realistic. My younger sister goes to the same school I did and has the same syllabus I had. Many evenings, upon returning home from work, I find her using AI to study—to understand what a poem might mean or to analyse the characters of a play. “Ask me,” I want to scream. “I’m literally right here!” But AI doesn’t scold you for your grammatical errors like an elder sister does, so I get why she prefers it.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
