Given that Filipinos are famously intellectually-stunted as it is, moves by the Philippine government to bock Grok (the artificial intelligence (AI) app within X — the social media site formerly known as “Twitter” — should be a welcome development. At the moment, the Philippines is reportedly exploring options around this but under the pretext of “cracking down on sexually explicit content generated by Grok on the social media platform X”. This also follows similar moves by governments in the region…
Indonesia temporarily blocked Grok on Saturday due to the risk of AI-generated pornographic content, becoming the first country to deny access to the AI tool.
Malaysia’s communications regulator said on Tuesday that it will take legal action against X due to concerns over user safety in relation to Grok.
Hardly surprising considering that porn has long been a consistent early-adapter of technology to deliver its products. This recent use of AI to generate porn at scale is a no-brainer as it significantly further lowers the barriers of entry into the age-old business of serving sexual gratification to a mass audience (just as videotape in the 1970s, camera phones in the late 1990s, and on-demand video streaming in the early 2000s did).
Then again, the use of AI to deliver porn (or sexualise kids) is the least of Filipinos’ problems. Filipinos, after all are amongst the world’s biggest consumers of Internet porn and sexualising kids is par for the course in Pinoy showbiz. The bigger problem is the Philippines’ galloping intellectual bankruptcy. Easy availability to hi-tech thinking crutches is likely contributing significantly to this mounting social problem. AI is a far more insidious beast as its chatbots get better and better at mimicking — through clever conversation — what appears to be sound thinking while putting up an unshakable veneer of self-confidence.
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The consistent self-confidence with which AI chatbots go about their business with the hapless humans who engage them is the Dunning-Kruger Effect taken to its state-of-the-machine ultimate. A key aspect of this describes the way people who know little about a subject believe — perhaps as a result of an underdeveloped capacity for self-awareness — that they are far more knowledgeable than they actually are. Machines, however, don’t simply “believe”. They are engineered to confidently deliver “knowledgeable” conversation on any subject covered by their training datasets. Small surprise considering machines are not self-aware.
Imagine then such a society — of Dunning-Kruger people dependent on Dunning-Kruger machines to do the their thinking!
The only way Filipinos can take back their ability to think is to stop cheating on their homework. The means to cheat is now so ubiquitous that cheating has become normal — and thinking will, as such, remain stunted. If Filipinos are serious about treating this national-scale stunting as a true crisis that demands crisis-management solutions, that puts any decision to ban AI chatbots in the Philippines in its proper perspective. The only way Filipinos can regain their ability to think is to start using their brains. That won’t happen until you take them off their strollers.
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