Dr. Steven Novella

They just were told what the authoritarian government told them.

And whereas, you know, in countries that are more open, you know, free speech and commercialism, whatever, it's like we get savvy about... Like, we know commercials are trying to deceive us, and, you know, we get more savvy that way.

When...

people get with access to the internet and now the AI is just an extension of that.

People are actually getting smarter.

I put that in air quotes because depending on how you measure it, right?

Their intelligence is just one thing.

But if you do standard IQ tests, they're actually increasing over time.

So people have way more access.

You're probably too young to know that before times when you would get into a debate with somebody about some fact, it could be like, who was the star in this movie, whatever.

And you would just never find out what the right answer was because who's going to,

How would you find out?

If it was the kind of thing you could look up in an encyclopedia and you had one, you would do it.

But now it's like instantly you have access to the world's store of information and you find the answer and that's the answer, right?

If it's something factual like that.

controversial statements like, do vaccines cause autism?

The internet's terrible for that because then it's, oh, how do you use it?

What skills do you have?

What's your Google foo?

Now, what's your AI foo?