Stephen Downes

A bit of a theme has emerged in today's newsletter, and it has to do with the ablative effects of AI (Anil Dash does not write about this, but I'm getting to it). In statistics, there's this idea of 'regression toward the mean', which in writing becomes 'regression toward the bland', or as Claudio Nastruzzi terms it, semantic ablation. Well, that's not me. But... why? It wasn't simply protection from AI, because when I was growing up, AI wasn't a thing. But what was a thing was television. Except - I hardly watched it all either as a child or a youth or even through most of my years of university. I would put on some headphones and read or write or code. I was a very serious and studious young man, and very socially inept. Still am. But I also have insights into the world (that I think are) worth having that weren't ablated by relentless commercial media. But now I read Anil Dash (as I finally talk about the article) describing how to protect children from the harms of AI. And - fair enough. Protect them from exploitation and manipulation and regression to the bland. Keep them off X/Twitter (and Meta, and TikTok). Stop schools from using LLMs (not just chatGPT). And - let's see if you can do this for them and for yourself - turn off the television.