Let’s beware pitfalls of AI lest we become a community of morons!
We believe the operator of this “bajaj” we came across in Tegeta, Dar es Salaam, wanted his signwriter to paint, “God BLESS (not blees) Nilan.” Trust signwriters! PHOTO | AMS
Having AI (artificial intelligence) at our disposal shouldn’t mean we stop engaging and straining our brains.
If you fall into the AI trap, it will be just a matter of time before you kill your brain!
Yes; you either use your brain or lose it. My expert sources say if you don’t actively challenge your brain, overtime, you develop what’s known as mental atrophy.
Your memory gets poorer when you aren’t even 50-years-old; your thinking gets slower and you stand a higher risk of cognitive decline and dementia.
As professional scribblers, don’t allow that to happen to you. Media owners will be doing disservice to humanity if—standing at the altar of maximising profits—they reduce the number of editors and proof-readers to cut costs.
When a young reporter makes language mistakes and a sub-editor identifies them, the latter will give feedback to the former and learning will have taken place therein.
Sub-editors, the newsroom superstars, are also susceptible to making mistakes here and there. It’s human to err, so the adage goes.
When a proof-reader notes what his “boss” the sub-editor missed, and a conversation takes place in that regard, a learning process goes on that way, and brains are thereby sharpened.
While it’s fine applying AI to expedite our scribbling processes, we shouldn’t allow it to render our brains redundant.
Otherwise, we risk creating establishments of absolute morons that masquerade as brilliant communicators!
Having thus lectured (bah!), let’s move to our essential task of sharing linguistic gems picked up over the week. Here we go…
We start by taking a look at what obtains in Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet of Saturday, June 20, whose Page 7 has a feature article with this headline, ‘Gambling Addiction: A growing threat to East African YOUTHS.’
The intro for the article reads, “Across East Africa, gambling has become an increasingly popular activity among YOUNG PEOPLE.”
On Page 11, there’s another article with the headline, ‘YOUTHS as catalysts for social and economic development.’ For the intro of this one, the scribbler writes, “YOUNG PEOPLE play a critical role in shaping the future of the society.”
You’ll note that in both pieces, the writers show that by “youths,” they are referring to “young people,” a term which puts in one basket young males and females. However, when you say “youths,” so says our dictionary, you should be having in mind only young males.
When referring to a combination of the young of both genders (and that’s what the two stories are about), the word is YOUTH (not youths). Our example: Tanzanian YOUTH are tomorrow’s leaders of this nation.
We wind up by checking out what was obtained from Bongo’s huge and colourful broadsheet of Monday, June 22. Its Page 13 story is entitled, ‘ALL creative artists advised to protect their ARTISTIC works.’
The adjectives “all” and “artistic” have been unnecessarily used—or maybe, just to “balance the headline” as we say in newsroom lingo. It would suffice it to simply say, ‘Creative artists advised to protect their works.’
For the article’s intro, our scribbling colleague writes: “Young CREATIVES in Tanzania have been urged to recognize the value of their CREATIVE works by protecting them legally…”
The persons being written about here makers of works of art—creatives.
Now, why tell the readers that these persons have been advised to value their creative works, as if anyone might have advised them to guard, say, engineering works?
It would be okay to simply say, in part: “Young CREATIVES …have been urged to recognise the value of their WORKS…”
