"Concerning" AI

Everyday concerns on Artificial Intelligence

Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash

AI has been the buzz for some time now. It’s been there long enough that “Ask Chat GPT” has become the norm rather than Google IT. It’s been there long enough to take over Lingo, and over life. It’s being pushed into our faces, there seems that we cannot do about our business without AI getting in the way and offering unsolicited advice. AI has become something like that relative that we try to avoid, especially when you are planning something. Only that people are actively embracing it, and a great deal of them saying we got to embrace the world as it moves along.

Clearly, I’ve got my share of thoughts about it, which means you’ve got to hear it. That might seem a little undemocratic, but then again, you signed up for it (I am glad you did).

AI became a thing in the last year of my undergrad, or the year before. That was a couple of years ago. I remember this, because people started mentioning that we could put our readings into AI, and it would churn out key points and answers for you. I remember this more so, because a faculty teaching us history of the underprivileged mentioned this in class. He mentioned that perhaps in time, we would have to see citations like ai & et.al, if people were fair about how we writing about stuff.

Now, I am proud to say that I’ve never used ai for academics. Even when I had to come to class without reading some of 200 odd pages were supposed to read every week, I’ve made sure to not use AI at all. It’s something to do with my personal sense of justice, and I am proud of it. All my grades were earned by me. Perhaps baring this one last group assignment, where my peers all used ai, so I succumbed to peer pressure. But otherwise, good. I know that this is not a novel achievement, but I am just saying so.

But let’s get into it. What do I think of AI? I think it’s bad. I think we would’ve done just fine without AI.

See because I have always had a problem with getting nuggets of information. I hate it when productivity youtubers, do this thing, where they read a book, and give the audience just the actionable points of it. I hate the apps that do that, and the sites that do that. The reason is that I think this takes away the soul of the act of reading or just anything. It just becomes some other content you consume, while going about your life, even though you might be conscious about this decision.

Reading was not a passive act, it was something that engaged multiple senses at once, with a time dedicated just for that. You put considerable effort into reading a book, and the effort in itself was a part of the result. Let that be anything, self-help, or non-fiction, fiction etc. This act of making notes was something that you expected of yourself to do, which meant that you had some more motivation to pay attention.

Accessible AI just exacerbates this problem. It takes over the thinking for you. More importantly, it takes over the searching for you. Now what does that mean. When the internet was a more interesting place, you had to read a bit to get some information. You’d have to say, read a couple of articles, go over some forums, and do some tinkering about, before you could the proper information you were looking at. In this process however, we used to read a lot of background information as well. If you were looking for some film, or a specific reference, or on how to update your BIOS, or what “BIOS” means, for that matter, you would red a couple of other things as well.

In the process of finding a piece of information, you get a lot of information on the periphery of whatever it was that you were looking to understand. This made you perhaps a little bit wiser that you were before. Chances are this information would come in handy sometime when you are doing whatever tinkering you wanted to do in the first place.

With AI though, you don’t get to do that. You get just the information you are looking for, and not anything else. For me, this is concerning, because it seems that we are comparatively become a tad bit dumber that we would’ve been without AI. It also means something else. That habit of “this info might come use in the future” just disappears, because we could just ask AI about it later.

Work places have also become harder to navigate because of AI, especially those places that require some level of writing. We are being asked to delegate work to AI, and just fine tune it, to make it look human. But creating new content doesn’t work that way. Editing is one thing. Writing something new is different altogether. The idea of editing a template to make it fresh makes zero sense at all, just because however edited, the text will have the structure and the flavor of old model. What happens here is that the expectation to produce new text is ramped up, while being asked to keep the same level of quality.

Getting back into the case of academics, AI just kills the mood. AI kills the act of reading, that you would invariably have to make, at least to get minimal test scores. Discussions regarding the reading, on making notes, on filling up your margins with thought on the reading, all vanish in one click of a button. Rather than talking about navigating text, we now tend to talk about the best Model that will help you skip over reading the text. And you are pushing into the world, a bunch of graduates, who simply lack the ability to read & recall an academic text, to engage with it, or to write something that is humane and worth reading.

But what is wrong with this, provided we get things done? Well, the fact that the large bunch of AI agents eventually boil down to a few powerful firms, to whom to we are eager to outsource of ability to read comprehend and write. Now imagine all mainstream AI firms go rogue, and I mean how Elon Musk did. Imagine the flow of digital information was suddenly censored, and remodeled to fit propaganda. All of us “academics” would be a bunch of useless idiots who can’t for the life of them engage with an issue contextually and intellectually, to figure out ways to ignite social change, like they always have. Like all times, changing time, have made us more susceptible to be controlled by the Big Brother