Without mincing words, I genuinely think the push for artificial "intelligence" has severely damaged the global society. We have already seen the use of deepfakes and generated images to defraud and mislead large swaths of people, which is horrible, but the push for AI has also ruined a lot of regular elements of daily life. The biggest example of this is how google is now far less useable, as it pushes an AI overview (which has had errors such as telling users to use glue in a pizza recipe) and now promotes websites that are not useful for what you're searching for. Apple has done this too, having announced a multitude of features last summer that still have not come out yet for its users, with the chief software engineer this year admitting that they need more time to develop those features. The absurdity of that is that they already announced them. The exact reason why many companies have come out with AI features, even if they're not good or ready, is because of the stock market push for investment in AI, forcing public companies to release some sort of AI or risk their stock price plummeting. All of that being said, I recognize that there are some benefits to AI, from simple things like spell check or an AI discovering cancer faster than a human ever could. These possible benefits, however, are less prevalent than the severe degradation of the digital landscape. It truthfully pisses me off every time I see someone create "art" with AI, because wasn't the entire purpose of AI to free up time for people to do more creative things like... art? But instead we have a world where everything is artificial. Regarding deepfakes, I could tell which is real versus fake roughly 50% of the time when we did the tests in class, so I cannot imagine the immense damage this is having on more vulnerable populations, like lonely grandparents, who don't understand when something is obviously fake. In conclusion, I hate AI and what it's done to our society, and I really think we should be supporting real humans doing real work.
Hi Austin, Thanks for this blog post. I appreciate your thoughts and insights. When taking part in a panel discussion this past Sunday on AI and Ethics, a young guy on the panel kept talking about AI being a corporate conspiracy to get people to buy and invest. I did not give it much thought at the time. but your blog reminds me that I need to think about this some more. I understand hating AI. It is damaging the ways we connect the ways we learn, communicate, and connect. As a teacher, I mourn the loss of traditional reading and writing skills. But then I cannot bring myself to hate AI. Change is simply change, neither good nor bad, and it can't be stopped or ignored for too long. Two thousand years ago the Stoics advised to stop stressing over external events we cannot control but, to live in harmony, to concentrate internally over what we do have power to control--our thoughts and and reactions. Not easy to do, but I try. Thanks for you candid response.
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