I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with the real meaning behind the abbreviation “AI”. Listen, can we just be real here for a moment? Maybe let’s all drop the pretense about how busy and important we all are and just sit with some thoughts for a few minutes.
AI is not going to help you. Relying on Chat GPT and other forms of generative AI to do things for you is actually hurting you.
The very goal of AI is to do things for humans. You’re busy, you don’t have time to do stuff. Don’t read the search results one by one, let AI summarize it for you. Don’t write that boring paper, let AI write it for you. Don’t do the research, let AI find it for you. Don’t hire a graphic designer, let AI design it for you. It’s all about cutting humans out of the equation. Did you read that last sentence? It’s all about cutting YOU out of the equation.
When we started with smart phones, I was there. Always a skeptic but convincing myself I’m a realist, I gave the first generation of iPhones the side-eye. I didn’t think we needed all that in our hands when we all had a computer on our desk. They got me with the music, though. Yes, it was a phone and you could send text messages but you could also keep your entire music collection in the palm of your hand. I’m a big-time commuter, so by gen 3, I signed up and never looked back. I thought it was cool when I could get my email on the beach. Until I realized I could be emailed while I was on the beach. Now, we’ve pretty much all moved into “on-call 24-7” sorts of jobs. I guess that convenience came with a pretty big price, huh?
These smart phones didn’t end up saving us any time. They simply ushered in an era when more of our time would be demanded by jobs and by social media. Look at it with honest eyes, guys, we kind of lost that one too.
Now we have a generation of school kids who know how to use AI to write papers without being caught by AI detectors. It’s not that hard. I know you’ve heard the stories about the dumb ones who didn’t proof read the AI draft, but you may not have heard about the larger group of more clever students who used AI to do the heavy lifting and then rephrased the whole thing in their own words. They didn’t do the work, didn’t learn what they were supposed to learn but still got the credit and moved on. They’re driving on your street and they’re going to vote in November.
We also have teachers who are using AI to write lesson plans. That doesn’t sound evil at all because we know we expect far too much from teachers already. Using AI sounds smart because any way we can give teachers more time, that’s a good thing. But it doesn’t stop there. A shortcut is a shortcut and any profession will find ways to use them to save money. To cut costs. To cut jobs. Remember that teacher thing? Do you also remember that Star Treky weird speech the First Lady gave recently about robots taking over the teaching profession. Still think it’s a good idea to use AI to write a lesson plan? As soon as they see they can do it without you, they’ll do it without you. It’s all about cutting YOU out of the equation.
Most recently I saw that several AI experts agree there’s at least a 20% chance AI will be responsible for the demise of human existence. That’s another sentence you should read again. That wasn’t Joe-Bob down the street from you. These were AI developers and technology experts. It’s all about cutting YOU out of the equation.
I’m 54 and my body doesn’t work as effortlessly as it did when I was younger. I grew up outside playing, working and moving all the time. As I got older, I noticed certain movements were different from when I was 16. In my 20s I noticed that my musculature was not visible anymore. It scared me enough to start looking into exercise. I was running pretty regularly, but I started running even more. I added some stretches and weights to my routine. In my 40s, I noticed that I didn’t recover as quickly from races and that the food I ate actually made me feel bad. I had to make more changes.
Steadily since then, I’ve been adding more and more to my daily routine. I stretch more. I do more strength training. I still run a lot. If you ask me why in real life, I’ll make a joke and you’ll laugh about how crazy I am. But if you want the truth, it’s because I learned about atrophy in high school biology. Then I learned about it again in that college Bio class I barely passed. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
I’ve watched my elders grow old and become inactive. I’ve literally watched some of them disintegrate right in front of me. Wrinkled skin and bones where there use to be muscle. Now when I read about exercise for people my age, the word atrophy gets used a lot. Exercise experts agree that men in their 50s reach a point of accelerated muscle loss if there’s no exercise to fight it. The body knows to focus on what is important and those things we’re not using must not be important. If it’s not important, the body will do away with it.
Find how AI can become a shortcut for you and use it. Then watch yourself forget how to do that task. Watch students stop doing research from sources they actually have to read and stop writing papers with their own brains. Watch them let AI do it all for them. Then watch them lose the ability to research and compose. Stop using human intelligence and watch it go away. There’s already data showing we’re losing intelligence by the year.
You’re not too busy to read more than one Google result. You’re not too busy to write your own caption for Instagram. Please stop using AI. Use your own intelligence.
Use it or lose it.
Statement of the obvious:
I am aware that AI has shown positive results in helping to detect and remedy medical concerns like cancer. I think this science and medical based application is a proper use of technology. While I can likely support the use of natural resources for things that actually provide a service to humanity, there’s a vast difference between this use of AI and the most common uses that cross my path on a daily basis: dancing elf videos with your face, making your cat speak English, faking an artist statement and sourcing recycled ideas for visual art. Generative AI is hurting you a lot more than it’s helping you.
