- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 24/Aug 08:18

Dear AI: I’m good, thanks

The world is free to argue back, forth and sideways about the use of AI for everything from how to cook noodles to how to write novels. I’m out of it. I have made my peace. Because – and I think this is the thing most people don’t talk about – this is not about winning. It’s not a case of: “No AI for me or I’ve completely surrendered to its ubiquity.” The people of the moderated middle seem few and often confused. As if they know they will have to pledge allegiance to one extreme sooner rather than later. Mine is an easy-going relationship with AI, to wit: it is but a simple tool. Sometimes I am happy to have the opinion of the spell-check function in Word. I may choose not to accept its suggestion, but I’m glad it raised a flag for me to heed. I’m also delighted by the way YouTube curates the music I want to hear. It’s odd it so often thinks I want to hear a Sparrow medley in between Bunji and Annie Lennox, but I trust it will get over it in time. Pity poor ChatGPT. If not for this beleaguered bot, we’d likely not be talking so much about the incursion of non-human influence in our lives. Because AI has been around so much longer. It’s there suggesting what you should watch on Netflix, it gives you directions, it’s Alexa and Siri, and if you have smart devices at home, you are, in fact, living in it. Most of us don’t think we’re being held hostage by robot vacuum cleaners. They’re just appliances, we say. But now that we know that ChatGPT can write advanced academic papers and design new bedrooms for us, things are different. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I thought about AI, all I can say is that I wish those dollars were in a stable currency. The terrible fear that I invite everyone to share is the death of independent thought. I know this is a familiar drum for me to bang. I’ll talk about it every time I talk about schools. Or research. Or shaping opinions. Or which fork to use for fish. I am nothing if not terrified that with every day the Lord sends, we are a little less able to understand something unless pre-packaged answers are on offer. Life is seldom multiple-choice. There are no autofill forms when you’re trying to explain to your partner how, why or when they hurt you. There’s no set list of answers playing in the background when you have to decide how best to help an aging relative who needs care. Life, thought and words, what do they have in common? Boxes. This is not only about my generation, because I’ve only seen it get worse over time. And when I look back to the before-me time, I’m not too happy about what I see there. The world has been putting language into increasingly meaningless boxes for a while now. (Everything from cliches to text acronyms.) How we think has always been a fragile thing because we’re so susceptible to influence. Now I worry that independent thought is not a fragile thing, it’s barely a thing at all. And then life. How we live, the choices we make, what families look like – there’s a terrifying copy and paste feature people are opting for instead of finding the solutions that are right for them. AI is not a good ally for me. I’m happy to learn new things like how to dress for a holiday in Croatia. Or how to get rust off a door hinge. But what I want more is someone to talk to about why I think reading Kafka should be mandatory in TT or how local organisations can raise more money for animal rescue and homework centres. AI is not bad. But it is only as good as what is fed to it. And if we have put our experiences and the way we talk about them into a very small box, we’re really not feeding the machine what it needs to open new portals for us. All we’re doing is letting it do our thinking for us. And we become even less independent. Friends who read science fiction have long told me that they knew what the future would look like years before something new was upon us. I didn’t realise how little room there would be for me in that world. The post Dear AI: I’m good, thanks appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.