I, as I may have made clear on a few separate occasions on these hallowed pages, fucking hate generative AI. I do not use it. I do not need to use it. I do not want to use it. And I cannot wait for the whole bubble to pop and this whole shitshow to go the way of the NFT and the Metaverse.
In the last few weeks in particular, I've found that there are a lot more people seemingly trying to push AI as "sort of all right, really". You know the sort of thing, people just casually, jokingly drop into a Discord chat that "out of curiosity, [they] threw it into Gemini to see what would happen" and before you know it, all meaningful human conversation has been replaced with copy-pasted obsequious fawning over the prompter, bold-type section headers and bullet-pointed lists.
Not only that, but the press are at it, too; just today, Undark Magazine (which I've never heard of prior to today) posted a piece called "Abstinence from AI is Not the Answer", in which the authors, C. Brandon Ogbunu and Cristopher Moore, make the baffling assertion that refusing to engage with AI "puts vulnerable people at risk".
"Like many new technologies," they write, "AI can either amplify inequality or ameliorate it, depending on how it is deployed. And fears about the likelihood of it amplifying stratification and segregation are valid. But advocating for abstinence will deny communities access to the tools the privileged are already using to help them write college essays, do their homework problems and learn a second language. Puritanical stances leave people ill-equipped to use this technology responsibly and unable to benefit from it."
Okay, but… hear me out… generative AI is terrible at all of those things. AI writing can be spotted a mile off. It gets answers to basic problems wrong, making it useless for homework. Due to its propensity to hallucinate and fawn over the user, you can't necessarily guarantee that its use of a non-English language is correct, nor that it will correct you if you get something wrong. And, more importantly than all of those things, relying on generative AI to do any of those things strips you of the ability to do them yourself. Not only that, it kills your curiosity to learn and discover new things for yourself, because it's much easier to just ask the chatbot to do it for you rather than to put in the work to learn a new skill yourself.
It's this latter part that really concerns me about generative AI. I've seen so many people willingly hand off to a chatbot during normal discussions and arguments and think that's a shortcut to "winning". When our legal and medical professionals are caught using these unflinchingly awful tools, their own skills and knowledge atrophy because they have no need to retain them — the chatbot will do all the hard work for them.
And what happens when, as looks increasingly likely, the money runs out and all these monumentally wasteful services are no longer able to operate? We're going to need humans who can actually do stuff again. And I'm concerned we're going to struggle to find them, because just over the course of the last couple of years I've seen a frightening amount of people completely give up on seeking out reliable information, knowledge and training for themselves because they can just ask the chatbot.
To address Ogbunu and Moore's main point — that abstinence from generative AI puts vulnerable people at risk — I say, full-throatedly, bollocks. The Internet has been a constant presence in all our lives — whether we're privileged or vulnerable — for decades at this point, to such a degree that it is considered one of the basic utilities these days. It is rammed full of helpful, thoughtful, weird and wonderful information, and the only skill one needs to cultivate in order to take advantage of this is how to determine whether or not something is a reputable source. That is something that we learn to do in school — or we should learn how to do, anyway.
If you hand that job over to a chatbot which is demonstrably wrong a statistically significant amount of times you ask it a question, you are not making use of that skill. That is not democratising the delivery of information; it is filtering all that information through a technology that, at its core, has been designed only with the interests of its billionaire owners in mind. And not only that, to get the supposed "best" out of these chatbots, you're expected to pony up $200 or more a month for a subscription. That doesn't sound very inclusive to the most vulnerable of society.
"Choices we make now will determine whether AI will be a tool for the powerful, dazzling the rest of us with its hype and subjecting us to its harms, or whether it will be a tool — imperfect but useful — in everyone's hands," conclude Ogbunu and Moore.
If it's an imperfect tool, it's not useful. I repeat: I do not use it; I do not need to use it; I do not want to use it. My choice is made; if I see anyone "powerful" using generative AI, I will laugh at them, because they are depriving themselves of the joy of thinking, of learning, of discovering, of creating. And then I will pity them.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
Discover more from I'm Not Doctor Who
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
