The Importance of Art and Literacy in an Era of Artificial Intelligence
- Anisa Chandra
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
By: Anisa Chandra
This article wasn’t written with AI. That statement takes on more meaning as more of our world becomes centered on ChatGPT, Gemini, or ClaudeAI outputs. And you, dear reader, may be thinking to yourself: Why choose the harder route? Why spend hours creating a piece of media that could have been optimized, could have been done by a chatbot in a minute? To me, that’s because at the end of the day, an over-reliance on AI devalues human creativity and thinking. Right now, we’re using chatbots to create mediocre work, blinding ourselves by thinking that if we type fast enough, we’ll keep our jobs, keep our lives. This is where the theme of this article presents itself — the fact that art is important. Whether you write articles, teach students, or cure patients, anything you do that creates goodness in the world is art. “The expression of human form and imagination,” (1) as Oxford Dictionary quotes art to be, is what separates us from a robot that can work faster than we can, for lower wages, and without needing benefits. It’s what, at the end of the day, will prevent us from starving on the streets as AI slop is fed into our brains, AI has taken over our jobs, and AI solutions are offered to fix these AI-generated problems (if anything does). But how did we get to this point?
The idea of AI began when engineering pioneer Alan Turing asked himself, “Can machines think?” The infamous ‘Turing Test’ resulted from this, which stated that if an interrogator was unable to differentiate a human from a computer, then that computer would be able to call itself ‘artificial intelligence’ (2). MIT graduate James Slagle was one of the first to attempt to solve this problem in 1961 with SAINT, a machine with the intelligence of your average college freshman. While it was able to solve challenging calculus problems, it could not think or even match the mathematical capabilities of any man or woman with a degree. One of the next notable inventions was the Stanford Cart, created by James Adam. In 1979, it was able to navigate a room full of chairs without human assistance, demonstrating the increasing independence of machines during this era. The 1980-90s were when the idea of artificial intelligence really took off. The decade started with the first conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, held at Stanford University, and ended with IBM’s Deep Blue beating the chess world champion. However, the 2000’s created the products that many of us associate with AI today: Roomba, NASA rovers, Watson, and Siri (3). These products made AI more accessible to the everyday person, which is truly when it began to shape our lives.
However, AI has never influenced the lives of everyday consumers more than in the present day, when many of us turn to ChatGPT over our own loved ones. The influence of ChatGPT on the artificial intelligence space is undeniable, mainly due to its heightened capabilities compared to other machines. The app quickly went “viral”, and after reaching 100 million users in just 2 months, its popularity was beginning to compare with that of TikTok, Spotify, and the other most popular apps of the App Store. What pushed OpenAI, the company behind this product, even further was the fact that Google was failing to recreate this level of machine learning. Sam Altman inspired companies from Microsoft to Amazon to push for this level of success, setting a bar so high that many consumers didn’t realize the true impacts of the tool they were using.
It’s no surprise that America is in a literacy crisis. But according to CNN, the question is whether AI is perpetuating the problem or solving it. The article cites the fact that Denver public schools have started to rely on AI reading apps to increase reading rates, which it has proven to do. What’s notable about this technology, named Amira, is that it can teach students who are native Spanish speakers as well, a skill that not all teachers may have but that the district’s thousands of Spanish-speaking students need to receive. However, Amira and other learning-focused AI tools aren’t all that they seem, and positive cases seem to be few and far between. MIT researchers grouped study participants into three groups, in which they were assigned to write an article using ChatGPT, Google search results, or nothing at all. Results proved that the group using ChatGPT actually had lessened brain activity, and couldn’t recount anything that they had “written” after the allotted time. Another study, also conducted by the MIT Media Lab, found that when participants were asked to write multiple studies, they got progressively lazier with each one. By the third essay, many of them relied on ChatGPT to both write and refine their essay, which resulted in what English teachers called “soulless” (4). And as increasingly more students are choosing ChatGPT over hand-typing their work, we’re watching the slow decline of not only literacy rates (as most students using AI can’t explain what they “wrote” (5)) but critical thinking skills as well (for the same reason). The impacts of this extend far beyond the classroom — illiterate populations are easier to manipulate, AI chats have the potential to be government-monitored, and a lack of creativity turns all works of “art” into mindless slop.
So, how do we escape our slow becoming into simply tools that type ClaudeAI prompts? The simple answer is, we can’t. We’re watching AI become a part of our vocabulary as words that are commonly associated with ChatGPT and Gemini (delve, for example) become more prevalent in our day-to-day vocabulary. AI has taken over marketing and advertising, jobs and school, and slowly, creativity. But there are things we can do to force ourselves to think, extend our attention-spans, and push ourselves artistically. First, and most importantly, REDUCE YOUR AI USAGE, quite possibly to the point of using it for nothing at all. It sounds drastic, but it’s what we all need to realize how much we depend on external sources to do our thinking for us. By spending ten minutes solving a math problem instead of using an AI-bot to solve it, for instance, you interact with your material in a more proactive way, which in turn allows you to remember it better. Secondly, you must create. Whatever stick-figure-creation that any one of us can make in less than five seconds is automatically better than AI-slop because its human made. Paint, write, sing — push yourself creatively, and you’ll watch your mental state bloom. But if you take one thing away from this, it’s to never fail to think critically. If, at the worst, you use artificial intelligence for the majority of your information, never fail to question every word that those machines feed into you. It’s imperative. Because once we stop questioning, we become as mindless as the AI we rely on.
References:
1.23.2026
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