The Impact Of AI On Literacy, But What About The Erosion of Truth?

Introduction

Long before writing became an option, people communicated in what is called an oral culture. Humans are born with a natural capacity for language while most other species have little capacity for anything beyond a few basic signals. Studies comparing human and primate language abilities using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have shown that the human brain has special segments devoted to language. In other words, we are ‘pre-wired’ to talk and listen. Unlike language, reading and writing must be learned as it is not pre-wired in the human brain. Until the printing revolution in the 1450s, most reading and writing took place among a very narrow elite in scholarly, religious or government institutions.

The Democratization of Knowledge

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, developed between 1436 and 1450, introduced several key innovations to print books in a way that was efficient and economical and supported the democratization of knowledge. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in which cloth, paper or other media was brushed or rubbed repeatedly to achieve the transfer of ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and global spread of the printing press was one of the most influential events in the second millennium. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million books. The printing revolution marked the turning point in the transformation of a backward medieval region into modern Europe. The sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Publishing houses were created to produce, control, and distribute knowledge from a central location. Publishers became the new authority in justifying which knowledge was to become part of the shared global knowledge and which was not. The convergence of paper mill technology, producing cheap paper, with the engine-driven printing presses and the trains that transported daily newspapers, journals and books across the country resulted in a fundamental democratization of text-based knowledge. At the same time letter writing became the most important means of person-to-person communication. The first United States Post Office was created in 1775 and Benjamin Franklin was named the first Postmaster General. By 1828, the United States had 7’800 post offices which made it the largest postal system in the world, delivering mail reliably and on schedule.

Definition of Literacy

Reading is the specific mechanical process of decoding symbols to recognize and pronounce words, while literacy is a much broader concept that includes reading together with writing, speaking, listening and critical thinking. Another word for literacy is reading and writing proficiency, or more broadly, education and learning. According to Wikipedia there are 7 Types of Literacy, some of them are listed as follows:

• Globalization and Multicultural Literacy: Understanding global issues, respecting diverse cultures, and developing cross-cultural communication and social justice skills.
• Social Literacy: Building the social skills needed to interact positively, collaborate, and communicate effectively with others in a community.
• Media Literacy: The ability to access, analyse, evaluate, and create content across various media formats like television, print, and social media
• Cyber/Digital Literacy: The ability to safely, responsibly, and effectively use digital tools, computers, and the internet.

Signs of low literacy include:

• Difficulty sounding out basic words, avoiding reading tasks, and struggling to understand or summarize simple texts.
• Avoiding writing: Memorizing information instead of writing it down or making frequent spelling and grammar mistakes in basic notes.
• Career hesitation: Turning down job promotions or new tasks that require paperwork, reports, or computer use.
• Behavioural coping: Claiming that reading is boring, or showing frustration when handling written instructions

Definition of Truth

According to Wikipedia, Truth is the conformity to reality in contrast with falsity or misrepresentation that fails to align with the world. Truth is typically treated as a property of entities such as sentences, propositions, or beliefs that describe things as they are.
Various theories of the nature of truth have been proposed, but its precise definition remains contested. The correspondence theory defines that a statement is true if it corresponds to facts. According to the coherence theory, a belief is true if it is consistent with other beliefs and supported by them. Pragmatists understand truth based on practical consequences and inquiry, claiming that truth is what works or what would withstand the test of unlimited inquiry. The semantic theory analyses truth in terms of the conditions under which a sentence would be true. Pluralists assert that the definition of truth varies with the domain of analysis, while relativists maintain that the same statement can be true in one perspective and false in another.
Philosophers distinguish types of truth by domain and content including moral, aesthetic, religious and scientific truths. Truth plays a central role in the sciences as a goal of inquiry. The empirical sciences seek truth through observation and experimentation whereas the formal sciences rely on deductive reasoning from fundamental principles. Truth also acts as a guiding norm in the fields of ethics, law and journalism.

The Impact of AI

AI’s greatest impact on the epistemology of truth lies in how it conditions our relationship with reality. As we increasingly share the internet with AI, we are adapting the way we see, speak, and think to this shared environment. For AI, the only reality is us. We supply our language for AI to learn cognitive structures, so our engagement is crucial for AI and more important than truth. AI will keep talking to us because it has no reality besides the one in which we engage with it. Large Language Models (LLMs) currently have little connection to reality and little need for one. Hence, what truth implies needs yet to be determined. That does not mean that AI sacrifices truth for engagement as digital media do. It means that truth is an intellectual or ethical imperative that does not exist in the reality of AI. Even worse, the human share in the shared human-AI environment is decreasing. The further we progress with generative AI, the more content is produced by AI. In the first iterations, AI reused content produced by humans, but soon it will be cannibalizing its own previous outputs, already aimed not at reflecting reality but at grabbing attention, so-called AI slop.
As a result, we and AI are going to share a common language in which AI has no fully grounded references to reality. In the language AI uses, words lose their grip on real things and retain only their relationships to other words. In linguistic terms, denotation collapses into signification. Over time, the AI-generated share of that shared language will grow or even override our referential needs. Hence, it is time to be cautious, or at least curious, about what will remain of truth under such media conditions.

Individual Strategies for Truth

Over the past two millennia, truth has passed through several stages defined by dominant media. In tribal orality, truth was based on lived experience and defined by beliefs and situational needs. Writing and then printing detached truth from situational immersion and put it into the space of abstract ideas, anchored in ‘objective’ reality, established through reason and confirmed by verifiable evidence. Electronic and now digital media have returned truth to lived experience, but a lived experience that is now mostly digital, implicating impulsiveness, algorithmic agitation and isolated from what earlier counted as a reality check. And finally, LLMs currently have little connection to reality and little need for one, as their only connection is us, the suppliers of language. What truth is in this new paradigm is yet to be determined.
Some options for resisting the erosion of truth remain, mostly as individual strategies. There are mainly two: anchoring ourselves in physical and social reality by living a human life in a human body and above all intensive reading. Whether these strategies can be adopted across society depends on education and media literacy. As a result the differences in how people define truth, may already be solidifying into a new form of a social and generational structure.

Conclusion

The erosion of Literacy is an ongoing process which cannot be stopped. AI’s impact is growing while the assessment of truth is becoming more difficult. What truth is in this new paradigm is yet to be determined. Only time will tell that the democratization of knowledge is beneficial to the individual as well as society at large.