Evgeny Morozov in Boston Review:
For a technology that seemed to materialize out of thin air, generative AI has had a remarkable two-year rise. It’s hard to believe that it was only on November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT, still the public face of this revolution, became widely available. There has been a lot of hype, and more is surely to come, despite talk of a bubble now on the verge of bursting. The hawkers do have a point. Generative AI is upending many an industry, and many people find it both shockingly powerful and shockingly helpful. In health care, AI systems now help doctors summarize patient records and suggest treatments, though they remain fallible and demand careful oversight. In creative fields, AI is producing everything from personalized marketing content to entire video game environments. Meanwhile, in education, AI-powered tools are simplifying dense academic texts and customizing learning materials to meet individual student needs.
In my own life, the new AI has reshaped the way I approach both everyday and professional tasks, but nowhere is the shift more striking than in language learning. Without knowing a line of code, I recently pieced together an app that taps into three different AI-powered services, creating custom short stories with native-speaker audio. These stories are packed with tricky vocabulary and idioms tailored to the gaps in my learning. When I have trouble with words like Vergesslichkeit (“forgetfulness” in German), they pop up again and again, alongside dozens of others that I’m working to master.
In over two decades of language study, I’ve never used a tool this powerful. It not only boosts my productivity but redefines efficiency itself—the core promises of generative AI. The scale and speed really are impressive. How else could I get sixty personalized stories, accompanied by hours of audio across six languages, delivered in just fifteen minutes—all while casually browsing the web? And the kicker? The whole app, which sits quietly on my laptop, took me less than a single afternoon to build, since ChatGPT coded it for me. Vergesslichkeit, au revoir!
More here.
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