What ChatGPT could mean for our literacy skills
Reading skills are safe for now, but our writing skills could soon change forever
This article isn’t about whether ChatGPT will replace writers in the future, but more about how it can change the way we think about literacy. More specifically: writing.
If you’ve used ChatGPT, you’ve seen that it has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human. You can ask it to write short poems, medium articles (although I completely wrote this article, I promise), help you with research on any topic and the list goes on.
This has huge implications for future literacy skills. E.g. students who grow up with ChatGPT and similar tools may always resort to it to get drafts of any writing task they get.
Science-fiction to science-fact
With new advances in AI, the gap between sci-fi and sci-fact keeps shrinking. This is why I think it’s fitting to insert a paragraph from Ted Chiang’s (sci-fi) short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” which is set in the distant future. The story begins with this:
"When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it
might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because
speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous.
My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how
sophisticated technology became, our daughter's skills would always rest on
the bedrock of literacy.
It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she's
an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she
has lost the ability to write. She doesn't dictate her messages and ask a
virtual secretary to read back to her what she said, the way the essayist
predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her
field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and
eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the
assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain
faithful to, and she'd have difficulty spelling out the words in this very
sentence. Under those circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second
language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write.
. . .
The changes leading to Nicole's current form of literacy were more ordinary
and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in
fact delivered utility and convenience."This section of the story is an interesting parallel to our future reality. Some key points that I’ve picked up are below.
We will be dependent on assistive software, like ChatGPT, for writing
Highlighting a section from the story above:
"Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her
field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and
eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the
assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain
faithful to, and she'd have difficulty spelling out the words in this very
sentence. Under those circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second
language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write."Although the people in the story have retinal projectors, which we don’t use, it’s a fascinating look into the future.
Imagine an assistive software that instantly suggests words to write for any task. It will give you many different versions of the same words in different flavours. One version might have a gripping opening, and the other version might have a joke you liked. All you have to do is make revisions to them and cut and paste words from different versions to compose any piece of text. That is a future we are moving towards.
The changes will be gradual, and we might not realise it
Focusing on this section of the story:
"The changes leading to Nicole's current form of literacy were more ordinary
and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in
fact delivered utility and convenience."This article might make you think our literacy skills are going to change overnight, but the changes will be more gradual. We will use AI assistive tools, but our literacy skills will still be with us for a while. We might even push back on these tools and not find them as useful. But in the coming years, they will get exponentially better and be too convenient for us not to use.
Over 5, 10, or even 20 years there will be considerable change, and we might not realise it.
The ability to read, speak, and listen is safe for now
In order to interact with ChatGPT or any other language model, you need to read the text it outputs and iterate on that. Long story short, this is why our reading skills won’t be affected by these assistive tools.
Additionally, speech synthesis tools to assist in reading text have existed for a while, but they haven’t replaced the convenience of reading yet. And finally, the ability to speak fluently is still core in our society and hasn’t been replaced.
Writing has already come a long way
Our writing skills have been getting augmented for a while now. In the early stages of writing, we only had pen and paper, and our critical thinking. Soon after, we would have thousands of books to learn the ways of writing and take examples from them.
And now we have the internet and all the world’s sources of information at our fingertips. Even before the advent of tools like ChatGPT, we are already leveraging the internet to help us in our writing. While writing this article, I did the following:
- searched whether similar pieces were already written on the internet
- looked at other articles on ChatGPT and how they structured their articles
- asked ChatGPT for its thoughts about how it will change people’s literacy skills (even though I didn’t use them)
Based on the above, you might say that my writing skills have already been augmented considerably. Without the internet, my writing would not the same and this article may have turned out a lot different.
Conclusion
AI assistive software is coming for us and it’s going to change the way we think about literacy forever. Our literacy skills have slowly been getting impacted by technology for a while now, but AI language models are going to speed up that change.
If we get customised responses from AI for any writing task, it could be a threat to student writing skills, the value of writing as a process, and the importance of seeing writing as a vehicle for thinking.
It’s important for us to ensure we adapt and react to this new technology. And I hope it will do more good for us than bad.
