What Everyone Is Talking About: AI - To Use or Not To Use
A recent hot topic – on social media, on TV, on podcasts, and in my own conversations with friends: the use of AI.
As a writer, I want to make my position clear: I do not use AI for any part of my writing or editing and never will. I do not feed even one sentence of my writing into AI. I do not ask AI to generate sentences or ideas for me. I think using AI in one’s writing and passing it off as your own is dishonest and unethical, and I will die on that hill.
The conversations and comments online have been passionate,
with people taking firm stands, either for or against. Of course, the common
argument thrown out, by those in favour of using AI is a tired old one, often
trotted out when it comes to technology: ‘use it or you’ll get left behind’.
In discussions with several friends, I’ve learned that many
use AI for all kinds of things: from medical questions to enhancing and aging
photographs (just for fun) to planning a trip to designing a room, to chatting
to a bot as if it were a real person. I was astounded. Some were equally
astounded when I said I do not use AI. The implication was that I was missing
out on the fun. Well, I’ve never been much of a person for ‘fun’. Not that kind
of fun, anyway. My idea of fun is doing my own research and planning for a
trip, curling up with a book written and edited by a real person, looking at
art created by an actual human being. And if that means being ‘left behind’, so
be it.
Real people creating real art
I keep repeating my argument about how much water and
resources AI uses, how it’s often not accurate, how it is plagiarizing work
from authors, and how we’re outsourcing our critical thinking to bots, but I’m
not sure if I’m convincing enough.
Yes, I’ve heard it said how much time it saves for routine
tasks in the workplace and some workplaces mandate it. But I’ve also heard it
said that while it will do the routine work tasks, employees will then be
expected to use all of their time doing the part of their jobs they used
to spend about 20% of their time on before: the hard part, the actual
thinking and creating and coming up with the plan to be carried out, the part
that is mentally exhausting.
I’m no longer in the workplace so I don’t have firsthand experience with that. All I know is – when I was working (in IT), that part of digging into the data, analyzing, coming up with a solution (to then be coded and executed – which is the part AI can now do), was mentally challenging, but I loved it. I could spend hours at it, but then I needed to go for a walk, or move on to something more routine and a little mindless to give my brain a break before it broke. If I didn’t have those routine tasks to turn to as a filler – what would I be expected to do? Keep breaking my brain?
Now, as a writer, AI worries me a great deal. Yes, it is
here to stay, and it has its uses (in the medical field, in sifting through
vast amounts of data to find patterns and correlations, as long as a real
doctor is then consulted), but in the arts? In replacing artists and writers
and editors and designers? I don’t believe AI has a place in the arts.
There are definitely instances where AI is so integrated into the tools we use, it’s hard to avoid it. But when we intentionally use AI in our everyday lives, without pausing to think about its impact on our resources, our brains, other people’s jobs and livelihood, we’re playing into the hands and pockets of the oligarchs who want us to do exactly that, without questioning why there are no guidelines or accountability around it. It’s not ‘fun’ or ‘cool’ or ‘productive’ to use AI. Yes, it’s ‘easy’ and it may save you time. But then – how are you using that saved time?
Yep. The inaccuracy. The plagiarism. The environmental costs. The physical costs (consider if it had been spent on curing malaria!). The social costs as people turn to a machine instead of to each other; as people turn to a machine instead of to their own reasoning faculties; as people use a machine to generate "content"; as people get sick of sorting out the AI slop and have to look at every comment, every fun image, every video, every web page for "did a human who knows what they're doing write this, or is it AI which will probably be wrong in various key details?" and how much of our energy and prosocial instincts that wastes.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that generative AI is mostly controlled by the least-ethical of the tech bros. The aspects of it that cause people to rely on it - 1. it's a yes-man and a flattery machine (see Richard Dawkins) and has a lot of cult-like features to it, and 2. if you don't use it, you lose it, where the outsourcing of "*which* resource is the best to use for this" means people don't *have* other options after a while. Cutting your own brain out of assessment means it shrinks; and the easier it is to use a particular technology, the easier it is to turn to it whenever we have a gap, or are tired, or in a hurry, or are upset, and continued use vitiates our ability to *do anything else.* (and like shopping for things we don't need when we're feeling cruddy, it doesn't fix anything)
At some point the weird financing schemes and "it grows because it will always grow" will either crash the market in a traditional sense (or it may kick off a round of hyperinflation), which is just maddening; profits go to one set of people, the expenses - electricity, pollution, water, sanity, societal costs - are nearly all distributed to other people. https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-slowing-down/
But no one wants to hear it except the people who already know at least part of that, and the credulity of the way it's reported on by large entities makes it hard to convince "normal people" that it's *not working well* even as there are court cases about its inaccuracy and about when it encouraged kids to commit suicide. Even the fact that Grok will still generate child porn has mostly dropped out of the news! It's *NUTS*. But a lot of things are nuts. And we're all tired, and critical thinking is harder when you're tired, and when something offers an easy way to skip a step, it's tempting, and tempting to convince yourself it's fine.
(and the knock-on effects for society: scams, spam, blog comments, emails, job postings, job applications, all mean that the signal-to-noise ratio has suddenly gotten *awful*; it's filling up the inboxes of academic journals. And then the effort to sift through this giant stack *via AI* results in ESL people and neurodivergent people both getting flagged as "AI" more than average for things they 100% wrote themselves. And anyone who gets an Idea can be flattered by AI into thinking they're the genius and that it's everyone around them that's duped and stupid because no one else 'recognizes' that 2+2=5, instead of having humans check their math. It's so extremely, deeply anti-social, and forces humans onto the defensive and overwhelms them, and we *do not need* more antisocial in this world.)
But, again, how to help those who think it's a miracle drug and not addictive at all, just really great? And who are sure it is factual *when it still has trouble counting how many times a specific letter occurs in a word* and still can't accurately cite sources? (although at least they have fixed some models so they cite things *that exist* instead of things that don't) I don't know.
At least, I don't know yet. Maybe we'll figure it out eventually! :-)
Thank you, thank you for this comment, articulating everything I wanted to say but so much better! I want to read this, word for word, to the next person who argues with me about how AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and has made their life so much better.
DeleteThank you!!! It's a... lot, honestly. And there are so many academic studies of the effects on humans, and I have yet to read one that has data and that comes out with "AI is a net good" rather than "AI might theoretically be useful for X but we don't know yet and more controls would need to be added to AI for it to be safe for this use."
DeleteThere are some uses for some generative AI in coding - but then there are some serious hazards, as it cheerfully makes up library names, and then the most common fake library names are sometimes created and posted online by malware actors. And the more you lean on a tool that writes the code for you (or copy and paste bits of sample code from the internet), the more you only *sort of* know what things are doing, and the less you know about your code and the vulnerabilities and edge cases. This doesn't matter so much for toy problems and one-off scripts that just provide an overview - although the overview may be inaccurate - but it is 100% not what you want in code that's in regular use.
Anyway! Removing all mental friction from your life is appealing at first glance, and we are all very tired and most of us are also very stressed, but it's like stopping all exercise: you'll lose capacity, and lose it rapidly, and that seems... bad?
My older son is very passionate about this as he does NOT use it but many classmates do for assignments/ online tests/ etc. I think it all evens out in the end - people who use it often don't understand the material and bomb the finals. I hate the AI summaries that come up when you search something. Like, how hard is it to, say, click on the links below?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was writing my book, a friend's husband told me that I should run it through chat gpt to "tighten things up" and then he told me he never reads novels, only non-fiction, because he likes to LEARN. What a wad, as my sons say.
I feel *very* sorry for anyone who has never learned anything from fiction. WHEW. (less so if they are avid readers of biography and therefore have a better chance of learning about human internality from there, but if you never think you need to learn about humans and understand how other people are different from you and the same as you... oh buddy you've got engineer problems.)
DeleteWhat a wad! Lol, I'll have to remember that term and see where I can sneak it into a conversation, although in my circles, they'll look at me askew.... Wad? what's that? I hate smug pretentious people who say they only read non-fiction because they want to LEARN!!
ReplyDelete