By JEAN PIERRE CHAUVIN*

I suspect that a large part of this generation views and uses Artificial Intelligence in an absolutist and uncritical way, exactly in accordance with what the market recommends and sells.

“The paralysis of the imagination completes the constraints of bureaucracy, which are motivated and justified by financial reasons” (Henri Lefebvre, Position: against the technocrats).

Twenty-odd years ago, it was common to pride ourselves on being voracious readers of Don Quixote e Great Sertão: Veredas. Separated by two and a half centuries, both narratives could not be easily grouped into the romance genre, but this in no way diminished the flavor of the stories and adventures, combined with the cultural repertoire and the adaptable language of the authors.

Cervantes parodied the novels of chivalry; Guimarães Rosa strung together a succession of “stories” under dense, voluminous and uninterrupted speech, like a river: course, discourse. Riobaldo, a river that is empty. Among us, impressionable readers, there might have been a sense of belonging to a group that dared to devour the printed word, leaving for later accessing e-mail accounts, sending SMS messages or participating in chat rooms: tools that must seem anachronistic and excessively formal to those born after 2000.

We were unaware that these were the death throes of the analog or pre-digital era. There was no uncomfortable feeling that we were updating, in an even more efficient and perverse way, the social misery and individual coercion described by George Orwell in 1984. The difference between us and Winston Smith is that, in the literary dystopia, the protagonist avoided the telescreen because he identified it as a severe mechanism of surveillance and radiation of false news; as for us, hybrid beings (mezzo analog, mezzo digital), since the advent of the internet, people have not only started to consume screens of different prices, brands and formats, but have also turned them into accessories as fundamental as a set of keys and a wallet.

When part of the infra-existence rests on compulsory consumption, the promised functionality of Gadgets is no longer the most relevant aspect. Smartphones, tablets and notebooks allow consumers to display greater purchasing power and expand the forms of socioeconomic distinction. Gradually, the notion of culture as the cultivation of literature and other arts has given way to immediacy, the counterpart of anxiety. It is no coincidence that the consumption of anxiolytics and mood stabilizers has increased significantly in the last twenty years. In the most varied environments, pills are ingested almost as naturally as candy or chewing gum.

Evidently, the relationship with the word has also changed. Since the so-called Artificial intelligence became positive by the big tech, both reading and writing skills have suffered. Brazilian schools and universities are full of committed students; but the proportion of students who do not study tends to increase. The other day, I heard that a student was bragging about having obtained a high average in a subject, without having wasted time reading the texts recommended by the teacher. The student relied on Artificial Intelligence to summarize the content of the articles and book chapters, before doing the assigned activity.

I suspect that a large part of this generation views and uses Artificial Intelligence in an absolutist and uncritical manner, exactly according to what the market recommends and sells. It doesn't matter that millions of professionals lose their jobs or are gradually replaced by applications that pirate data, imitate the styles of authors and artists or condense fifteen pages into half a page.

On the one hand, there are powerful far-right groups based in São Paulo distributing materials that distort the teaching of history, disregarding serious research carried out at universities; on the other, there is a growing proportion of pre-teens and young adults willing to exchange reflection for automatism.

Now, Artificial Intelligence does not create anything: it feeds on five thousand years of art, thought, culture and history, conveyed in databases in website. Jean-Michel Jarre, the French musician who has sold the most records in that country since the beginning of his career in 1976, has become a spokesperson for the “benefits” of Artificial Intelligence. In a recent interview[I] broadcast by a channel streaming, the keyboardist refuted attacks on Artificial Intelligence, claiming that musicians had been copying ideas from each other for decades.

What the composer forgot to admit is that there is a big difference between being inspired by other artists and transferring the ability to select and style songs to an app. In fact, it is interesting to see how creative “his” new compositions are.

Let's go back to the classroom.

It won't be long before we see the emergence of a proudly holographic, apathetic and scattered generation, incapable of reading more than two pages or watching a video that lasts more than ten seconds. These beings will have little of the human: self-centered and self-referential, they will act like customers and will be increasingly less tolerant of adversity and differences (despite the politically correct and supposedly inclusive discourse); incapable of aiming for anything other than compliments; incompetent at deciphering messages (even simple ones), because they have lost the primordial ability to listen (to others) and read (other people).

Knowledge implies admitting how much we lack; it presupposes curiosity, reasoning, imagination, discernment, etc. How much are users and apologists of Artificial Intelligence willing to subtract from themselves?

*Jean Pierre Chauvin Professor of Brazilian Culture and Literature at the School of Communication and Arts at USP. Author, among other books by On the art of (orienting oneself) [for postmoderns and generation Z] (Ponta de Lança).

Note

[I] Jean-Michel Jarre. “L'IA, une opportunité pour la Culture”. WAICF (10.2.2024). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQlDR3yRdps

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