219
Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
219 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
66067 readers
4693 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People bad at math use calculators. People with bad handwriting prefer to type. Weak people use levers. Slow people rely more on wheels. Its like were a bunch of tool using primates or something.
In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn't quite the same thing.
If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I'd agree. I'd probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it's generally comprehensible.
Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.
I'm not really sure what you mean. They are not perfect, and in fact it will usually reduce the quality of output for a skilled writer, but half of the adults in the US cant read and write at a sixth grade level, and LLMs are greatly improving their ability to solidify and convey their thoughts in a more understandable way.
Because they're not actually using the AI that way, to support them in their writing endeavors, they're just having the AI do the writing task for them.
A calculated doesn't do the understanding for you it just does the calculation. You still need to understand what it is you're asking the calculator to do. If you want to calculate compound interest you still need to understand the concepts behind compound interest, in order to be able to put the right calculations into the calculator.
I dont really think its fair to expect the barely literate to have writing endeavours. They are just trying to communicate without embarrassing themselves.