Last week, an Italian print newspaper, Il Foglio, sparked discussion by deciding to publish four pages a day of articles created using generative AI.
Style purists, grammar watchdogs, censors, and nostalgic defenders of the good old days immediately jumped in to point out how clearly recognizable the AI-generated text was—because of that word, or that syntactic structure.
The only thing that seems truly clear, however, is that within a few years, the number of working journalists will, optimistically speaking, be reduced to a tenth of what it is today. Evidence of this can be found in the energy many have put into discrediting AI’s semantic output—an output that can only improve, unlike, unfortunately, what can be predicted for most professionals of print and digital media.
The reality is different: all statistics show that the average IQ in the Western world has been declining—and this trend started well before generative AI became widespread.
AI won’t make us any dumber.
We were already dumb.
Over the last 20 years, we’ve witnessed a general flattening of everything that once represented cultural production: creativity is in decline, the internet has leveled language to the ground, and new generations don’t even know what a subjunctive is.
A mountain of meaningless content has flooded the web and now stagnates in datacenters from Cupertino to Santa Monica.
AI is what will save us, not what will destroy what’s left.
AI will be what allows a crowd of numbed minds to finally understand written content—because it will let them chat with it.
It will also be what enables someone to write a job application email without making gross syntactic errors.
Didn’t understand a movie?
AI explains it to you.
Can’t find the train schedule?
AI tells you.
Don’t know what to do next?
AI suggests something.
The advantages of using AI are many—especially for a majority of people who are digitally native, highly specialized, but struggle with general understanding.
They navigate systems, apps, interfaces. They work with tools and platforms. But when it comes to processing dense information, following a complex argument, or even reading a few paragraphs with full comprehension—they’re often lost.
This is where AI steps in: not as an enemy of intelligence, but as a translator of meaning, a bridge between noise and clarity.
It turns documents into dialogue, confusion into answers, and isolation into interaction.
We, who understand AI, sell it by the kilo.
Spoiler: what’s truly interesting is the research I’m currently conducting on how AI can help people with dyslexia write and communicate correctly—
something that used to be extremely difficult for them.
