This is not a fad. This is like the advent of writing.
Plato opined that people would lose their facilities for memorization and the passing of oral histories would falter and die. He was correct about that. We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did.
He was incorrect about that being as ruinous as he imagined, but it was as dramatic an impact on the human race as agriculture was to hunter-gatherer society.
I think we're at one of these societal delineations; before agriculture and after, before writing and after, before generative AI and after.
I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of writing was indeed ruinous; after all, without writing we couldn't have invented AI which is going to be truly ruinous...
(Fast-forward N years) I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of AI was truly ruinous; without AI we couldn't have invented X which is going to be truly ruinous...
> We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did.
it's rhymes and metric, and I'm pretty sure in ancient time people got repetitions wrong too, which is why we have stories with variations everywhere in the world.
What we miss is dedication, time and a facility with the language.
There's plenty of Italian people who have memorized Dante's Divine Comedy, for example.
Plato opined that people would lose their facilities for memorization and the passing of oral histories would falter and die. He was correct about that. We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did.
He was incorrect about that being as ruinous as he imagined, but it was as dramatic an impact on the human race as agriculture was to hunter-gatherer society.
I think we're at one of these societal delineations; before agriculture and after, before writing and after, before generative AI and after.