I would call myself an "AI realist." I think I belong to that group of people who can admit that artificial intelligence carries a promise of productivity, efficiency and ease, but that it still has limitations, and that it can't be placed in the same equation as the human mind.
The human mind is imperfect. It works quickly, irregularly; it reacts, it perceives, it never shuts down.
AI is a set of smart data, trained on centuries of human progress, creativity, books and snippets of anything available online. And even though we are quite aware of this, more and more humans are outsourcing their thinking, creative and analytical work to artificial intelligence, despite clear indications afterward that the work is AI-made, as if they simply do not care. (Think of the scandal about the recent opinion article published at The Financial Times.)
But we should care more, and we should care now. With the passage of time, anything easily turns into a habit, even constant writing with AI. Sure, AI can summarize data for us; it can help us brainstorm, can fetch sources, can do a lot, but can it write like us? Can it unpredictably write an (imperfect) article like this one?
AI always tends to make everything as straight, as punctual, as comprehensive, as possible because that is what machines do. It does not stop. It asks "Ask anything," and it can stretch the conversation almost forever in a loop that will make you ask yet another question, because it is programmed to do exactly that.
But where do we, as humans, come in?
Is AI taking away our chance to talk with our close ones, to ask our grandmothers about how plants should be watered? Is AI forcing our neurons to slow down and stop assembling data and thinking for ourselves?
I think it is. I see many AI tabs open, many AI-styled articles written, and everything seems like this mundane extension of the new age we are living in, slowly giving our inner selves to machines. It is not that fun to read lifestyle articles anymore. Rare are the cases where real authors sit down and put their experiences and hearts on the table and write long passages about what went wrong on their latest holiday. More are those with lists of "what to do, where to travel," but filled with AI slop.
The Latin phrase "Sapere aude," or German philosopher Immanuel Kant's "Have the courage to use your own mind," appears to be losing its meaning these days.
I do not know if this is because we as humans are lazy, or we are immensely tired by crises, wars and everything going on. But we really should stop and ask ourselves, "How much AI is enough AI?"
Irregularity and imperfection do matter. After all, Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare created all that art and masterpieces without any help from machines.
Without digging into recurring questions like why AI is going rogue, whether AI is gaining consciousness, or whether AI is becoming "super smart," we should stop ourselves and ask: "Is AI taking away from us the ability to think, the ability to respond, the ability to be and act as a human?"
AI, with all its progress, should not kill the way we think, write and produce.
