And now instead of Marge, it’s ChatGPT.

If you had a question that nobody could answer, you’d go down to the library, open up a drawer with a bunch of note cards in it, look to see if any of the note cards had a word about a concept you wanted to learn about, hope that the card existed, was in the right place, and listed a book that would actually give you the information you wanted.

Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it's your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.

You went to a library and read a couple of encyclopedias.

Glad AI is finally taking us back to an era of disinformation

This is actually a pretty interesting topic.

I was born in 1982 and we didn’t get the internet until 1998. Which means I was a kid and teen in a mostly analog world.

Your day to day knowledge was formed by things you were taught in school, the things you saw on the news and the people you were surrounded by. That gave you a fairly broad understanding of the world.

If you really NEEDED a correct answer, you’d use an encyclopedia at school or the library, or any specific book on the topic. But you had to be motivated to do that. And even those resources might be limited in scope or unavailable. My local library in the Netherlands would’ve had some books on US history for example, but you wouldn’t really find say, a biography of Jimmy Carter. So at some point, you’d reach the maximum depth of knowledge to be gained in your particular situation.

The internet really helps us drill down way, WAY deeper than what we could find in the 80’s and 90’s. I can now have in-depth knowledge on the most obscure topic and drill down as far as I want.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of people don’t use the web for that. Or end up actually misinformed because of it.

This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.

If you didn't have that, go to a library.

Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.

Whenever I would ask a question I would be told to go look it up. I was never sure if I was surrounded by people who didn't know anything or if they just wanted to get me out of the house by sending me to the library for a few hours.

And there was a friend's older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn't even ask.

We got misinformed at a much slower rate though. The newspapers could only tell us so many lies at a time.

It's better than what we have now though, which is going "I think elephants are actually seals that got lost on the way to the south pole" and then going on the internet and searching until you find exactly what you already believe, and then forming a social group around that, then voting in politicians who think that until that stupid belief becomes mainstream and there are politicians debating in congress whether to invade Kenya to transport all the elephants to Antarctica.

I had people arguing with me about blue blood long after the internet was available to everyone. I wouldn't ever tell them they were stupid, but I would say, "I don't think that's right" and they would usually say they learned it in biology or a science class in high school and I would say, "that still doesn't sound right. We should look that up later when get home to our computers" and then They would look at me like I was the idiot for suggesting they were misinformed in school... because you know... school teachers NEVER misinform their students... like ever 🙄

Speaking of misinforming your students; shout out to Miss O'Leary for saying Russia could Invade Canada with Tanks because we were landlocked during the colder months via the arctic.

aunt Marge has been replaced by AI now

Fun fact: You can still order a current print volume of World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,349.00

proof

shit I still remember a primary school classmate explaining to me:

one sneeze is from dust
two sneezes in quick succession are from cold
three sneezes in quick succession are from allergies

It's been 30+ years, someone pls remove this nonsense from my brain 😩