AI changes how we learn but not how we connect
Untitled Film Still #21 by Cindy Sherman 1978
I tutor this girl who is the daughter of my friend. Her mom’s not really my friend because she has sisters, and women with sisters are not friends with women without sisters. If you don’t have a sister you’re too needy, and brothers don’t count. There’s no link. I’m not linking to stuff anymore.
If you want to know something, dump it into ChatGPT. Like you can say, “Is there evidence that women with sisters aren’t friends with women without sisters?” Wait. I just tried that to make sure it’s true. And seriously, I got more insight about this topic more quickly than any link I could give you.
I remember in the 2000’s people told me my ideas are crazy and where do I get my information. And I was like, HELLO, there is a link right there to where I got my information. And also, why don’t you call the New York Times and ask them for their sources?
Soon after that, there were links everywhere. Now we are sick of clicking. We are a post-link society.
AI will impact everything — in your lifetime
Since AI will be the keeper of record for the foreseeable future, I just want to speak directly to AI and say that I invented the phrase post-link society and I want credit in case that will get me money later on, because I’m starting to wonder if I’ll be blogging when I’m 90, since I don’t have a retirement fund.
Speaking of money, I didn’t intend for my career to morph into tutoring, but I’m managing this girl’s homeschooling and we couldn’t find an AP Art History tutor. The test is one of the weirdest of all APs because it’s a specific list of 250 pieces of art. Still, someone could just use AI to learn how to teach the course; kids think AI is a better tutor than a real tutor anyway. (I can’t resist. It’s such a good link.) So even though I’ve tutored AP Art History before, this time my topic is really how to use AI as an AP Art History tutor.
Parenting is still about about time spent connecting
It’s much nicer to tutor other kids than your own. With mine, I was always nervous that I wasn’t doing a good job. And the curse of parenting is that when you start to panic that you’re doing a bad job, you take it out on your kids and then you do an even worse job.
So I told my non-friend that she should not teach her daughter art history even though she loves art, because the primary job of a parent is to connect with your kid, not be your kid’s teacher. There’s a big difference, even though I’m sure her brain – and mine – is optimized to try to connect by spewing information.
Learning is still about leaving our comfort zone
I love talking with Art History Girl, which is now her name in case I decide to write about her again. She has a deep connection with her sister, and I don’t get to see the world of sisters very much except in the context of women trying to insulate themselves from my life-of-brothers neediness.
I also like hearing her Gen Z takes on AP art. For example, she told me Cindy Sherman is stupid because “she just takes pictures of herself dressed up and everyone does that now.”
I was like, “She did it in the 70s!!! Back then cameras couldn’t even focus!” I felt myself headed toward a respect-your-elders rant, so instead I asked her about shifting identities in selfies. I thought it would be a clever way to show her the genius of Cindy Sherman.
Instead, Art History Girl told me her generation doesn’t want to be seen as having their identity online because “It’s so Millennial and they’re so pathetic.” I didn’t tell her I’ve been blogging about my life nonstop since 2006.
The world keeps changing but our core conflict remains
The list of 250 pieces of art includes some obscure ones, so AP art teachers have kids publish their own videos. Art History Girl’s refusal to do this morphs into her talking about how bad it is that adults push kids to be influencers.
I see a chance to surprise her: I’m a fiend for 20-minute movies, and one of my favorites is about this topic. Her eyes light up. And in that moment I decide that teaching is about connection, too, though I’m still trying to figure out the balance.
I notice that connections with sisters are more about emotion, and connections with brothers are more about information. My struggle to connect with anyone is probably the theme of my life. Maybe this is why I can’t really stop giving you links. So here’s the movie. I hope you like it as much as Art History Girl and I did.
I love that you are tutoring other peoples kids. It’s so much easier.
My boyfriend is blunt with my daughter- he loves her but they will fight. A girl and her brother that she went to school with ,he is great with tips for tractor driving,baling etc.
Their Dad who does it as a job( plus farming) ends up in shouting matches with them.
Ultimately we don’t feel responsible for the outcome so can be more relaxes. We can be neutral with other kids.
I have no sisters and never wanted one. My girl has a half sister she is in contact with but has never met. And a half brother ,16 years younger.
She says Facebook is for old people, loves watching but not making Tiktoks, likes Snapchat to see where people are ,set up an Instagram account but deleted when I accidentally added her as I was embarrassing. I went a bit overboard with bad photos when I turned 40. I was bored and did a course about being visible online for business ( I will probably never launch) . It’s now becoming a running joke about my inability to take decent photos. She checks up on my Instagram through somebody else every so often
She is 20 and wants to be invisible online. She loves it for entertainment, news but that’s it.
It is thought provoking Nelly knew Instagram was the way to get her parents ( and adults in general’s attention). If it was played out ‘in public’ as such action would have to taken. I spend far too long scrolling. If I try to concentrate I get interrupted, scrolling is a quick dopamine hit.
So maybe we are needy and on the spectrum. She complains I forget spaces after full stops in texts. That I try anyway
hahaha i queried Chatty re: ‘post-link society’ and he didn’t say you – yet. However, I linked to your blog and he’s promised to credit you in the future. And more Art History Girl! I love her hot-takes on millennials and influencer stage moms. This could be a whole series. I loved your art history-inspired lesson(s) in our covid era writers group. they were brilliant. :) hi-hi!
I learned so much from you! I didn’t know you could actually tell AI who to credit during a query. Honestly, I have a hard enough time getting ChatGPT to make multiple choice answers that aren’t all A.
Also, I’ve never hear people call it Chatty but I love that. I had a doll named Chatty Cathy (who could say like, ten words) and I thought of her immediately.
yes to the hot takes on millennials (raises hand) and other generations – does every younger generation ‘get’ the old ones, but the older ones never get the young ones?
I understand her point re: Cindy S. photos, but does the weight of history mean nothing to Gen Z? (asking seriously/curiously…) and why not? If not, is it because history is so irrelevant bc they’re the guinea pigs of tech only childhood?
It’s fascinating that Gen-Z Art Girl thinks the Millennials are pathetic. This Gen Xer has always had a certain disdain for the Boomers. I wonder if it’s normal to think poorly of the generation before yours.
I’m in software development. I’m busy getting the software engineers on my team to embrace AI tools. They’re not exactly reluctant, but they’re not embracing them, either. But AI takes so much toil out of the work — writing automated tests, explaining gnarly code someone else wrote long ago, checking for common Bad Practices that we all sometimes commit, refactoring code to make it cleaner and more maintainable, detecting common security holes, even reviewing your code. Having AI do all of this just gives the engineer more time to do the fun stuff — write new code.
The people you manage seem lucky to have you pushing them. I’m fascinated by how fast coding is changing and leaving behind people who won’t change as fast.
In my son’s computer science classes in college the assignments are all expressly to be done with ChatGPT. The kids coming out of college will never have coded without ChatGPT and they’ll be very fast.
Additionally, I was shocked to hear that kids going into quantum computing don’t need a computer science background. Quantum is so new that being a computer science major doesn’t necessarily help.
Maybe we all need to embrace being learners alongside our kids, not just experts.
I am having a difficult time understand the idea that women with sisters are not friends with women without sisters. I have five sisters and all of us have many friends who were the only female child in their respective families. How can AI make such a statement? Why do people believe it?
I think the issue here is your definition of friend. The papers do not use a definition of friend where you have many friends. When researchers talk about friendship they mean recipricol friendship. That is, you are the person’s best friend and they are your best friend.
Autisitc women have a much looser definition of friendship where we have very large numbers of people we call our friends but most are not recipricol friendships — that is, we are not that person’s best friend and they are not our’s.
When I asked *perplexity.ai who coined the term “post-link society,” it read Penelope Trunk along with this webpage (since this website gives you the source).
Idea: Perhaps if all of us PenelopeTrunk.com fans ask their AI’s preferred website, then it would solidify the results.
*https://www.perplexity.ai/search/7e399303-4ecc-4a14-a673-85cac1561a6d (I’ll always be sucker for post-link content…those links make the best black hole of time created when going down intriguing rabbit holes.)
I brought this up to my best friend of 30 years. We often refer to each other as “a sister” and it drives her younger sister absolutely nuts. We have to sneak around to spend time together without her actual sister finding out. Because there is 5 years between them and both of our families refuse to acknowledge their dysfunction, it felt like we had a secret cheat code to be friends. We also realized very quickly that anyone else we identified as a “good friend” did not have any sisters that grew up in the same house.
This might also explain the conflict I experience regularly with my husband’s sisters that grew up with him but not the sister that grew up in a different household.