AI Part 2: Choosing wisely

We may well look back on Nov. 29, 2022, as the day when humanity reached peak intelligence. On Nov. 30, OpenAI released the first version of Chat GPT, its generative AI-powered chatbot. There have been many more in the short time since, each more sophisticated and sparkly-seeming than the last.

Can we use these chatbots to do amazing things? For sure. Should we? That’s where it gets tricky. Last week in this space, the focus was on the big picture — balancing the use of AI tools for our benefit while safeguarding humanity and the environment from the worst of generative AI. But what’s our role as individuals?

Let’s start by refusing to be complicit in making ourselves stupid. Every time we ask generative AI to recommend a restaurant or summarize a movie or write something we don’t feel like doing ourselves, we’re losing a chance to exercise our own brain power.

How many times do we offload a task to Claude or Gemini or Copilot before we forget how to do it ourselves? How many ready-made conclusions do we have to be fed before our ability to think critically starts to atrophy?

And why on earth are we outsourcing the very things that make us human to entities controlled by corporations that assuredly do not have our best interests at heart — that want to keep us talking to AI so they can profit?

Every worry we confide to a chatbot, every purchase we discuss with it, every number we ask it to crunch is stored in some company’s data centre with the sole purpose of monetization. None of it is private; all of it is beyond our control, freely given away.

And then there’s the ugly reality most users of generative AI don’t want to face. That speech you ask AI to write for you, that funny photo mashup you “create”? They’re stolen, their million tiny components scraped by chatbots from the work of other people and reassembled so you can pass it off as your own.

It’s virtual plagiarism on the grandest scale humanity has ever known.

When we take the easy way out and ask AI to create a presentation or write song lyrics or generate a video, we’re not doing anything creative. We’re robbing the people whose work the AI was trained on, and we’re robbing ourselves. Are we so lazy and morally bereft that we don’t care?

We don’t have to get stupid by outsourcing our thinking. We don’t have to give up on creating something truly new and truly our own. We don’t even have to avoid new technology in general or AI in particular.

We just have to choose.