I was watching something on my tablet while I was doing my two-a-day treadmill session and because we’re subjected to having commercials even in the alternative mediums, I was forced to watch this Grammarly ad, where a girl that looks perhaps grad-school age is talking about how she has a massively critical group assignment, worth 50% of her course’s grade, due soon except that it just so happens to be on the same date as a, get this, annual fishing trip.
Back in my day, the options really were quite simple: go fishing, phone in the school work, risk not just themselves, but the grade of the group entirely; or, forget the fishing trip, focus on the education that chica is most likely financially on the hook for, and try to get a best grade as possible for themselves as well as the rest of the group.
However, we have long since sailed past those ancient times, so instead of prioritizing education over fishing, the antaprotagonist of our ad scenario decides to just boast about how she can use Grammarly™ to just basically, cheat. AI the fuck out of the rest of her assignment, and even use the software to anticipate the probably grade that she and her cohorts will get on it.
I can probably rant until I’m blue in the face about my general feelings towards AI, but I’m also not entirely above it either. Mostly, for redundant tasks that help me reach an objective, like clipping paths or removal of backgrounds in Photoshop, but never to completely outright do the work for me. Aside from the ethical reasons to not do such, I’m too much of a control freak with my work to let artificial intelligence, much less any other human beings do anything that I have to attach my name to.
But times have changed, AI is god damn everywhere, and we’ve clearly gotten to the point where it’s so prevalent, so inevitable and the negative stigma has wavered to where there are companies presenting services that basically extol how okay it is to just straight up fucking cheat and let AI do your school work for you. Like watching this commercial, I’m just thinking wow, they’re not even trying to sugar coat or veil the fact that you can literally have AI generate their entire assignment. There’s not even so much editing as much as it’s curating and approving what AI does for you, and it even goes as far as to generate shown work too.
The best part about it though is that when the antaprotagonist runs whatever grade predictor prompt, it hits a 97/100 and chica is all like word! All done! Like seriously, yeah 97% is an outstanding grade, but the fact that there’s no higher aspiration, no curiosity of what it would take to get that sweet perfect 100, that’s just another demerit for sadness of how everything about this ad and this era really stands for.
Clearly, the character of this ad, nor anyone at Grammarly were raised by Asian parents, because the first question out of their mouths upon seeing a 97% is, so, what did you get wrong to not get a 100%?
What I think is funny in this scenario is that the antaprotagonist seems to assume she’s the only one using AI to do her work for her, and if she’s got 3-4 collaborators on the same assignment, it’s safe to assume that they’re all doing the same things too. In a real-life case of this, it would be entertaining to imagine one dude using Claude, one dude using Gemini, one girl using ChatGPT, and then we have antaprotagonist using Grammarly, and they all generate assignments, just different enough to where they have some conflicts, and then the humans all can’t agree on which assignment to turn in, angst, strife, resentment and salt begin to bubble up, and by the time they turn it in, it’s this homogenized piece of shit, that a real professor would immediately identify as AI slop and fail them, but by now it’s safe to assume that their professor is also some jaded millennial tired of the direction of the world, and just runs their jobs through AI, to detect how much work is plagiarism, how much is AI-speak, and how many prompts were left in the final work, and just give them a B+ and call it a day.
To think before the end of my lifetime, these lazy AI-reliant fucks are going to be the people largely in charge of the world, with almost zero actual knowledge and capability of original thought, and would always be one EMP, infrastructure failure, power outage or loss of internet away from being rendered completely invalid for human survival.
If I can help it, I never want to be in this position of helplessness, and I hope I can steer my children away to not become one of these tech-breathing future zombies, and have some actual, usable talents if the world were ever to go full tits up.
Could’ve easily been titled under the Man, What A Stupid Commercial series that I’d used in the past, but this just triggered a slightly different nerve to where I could rant about instead.
