Having to write a book report in fifth grade on an author of a book and a book itself with only a school library or a local library available to you was an entire journey, not an afternoon. It took, like, a week, and you had to learn how to write footnotes and end notes with complete references and formatting and everything.

End during that journey, you had to learn a lot about how to do all of those things before you could even get at the information you wanted or needed.

When people say “things were better then, a lot of times that may be what they were referring to, because if I wanted to write a book report about, “to kill a Mockingbird“, I had to learn a lot just to get to that information. And that was the point of it. The exercise itself taught us in ported skills we would need for similar tasks in the future.

Now, with AI, I’ve put more effort into this comment then some kid does to produce a 10 page essay about that book and the author without even having to read the book.

How far we have backslid