It seems like everyone wants to talk about AI in recent times, and, well, I am no exception. In my current job, I have been tasked to come up with some guidelines and rules related to the use of Large Language Models and Generative Algorithms, or what is collectively being called Artificial Intelligence.
This AI is far from what I was promised as I read the science fiction and speculative fiction of the Golden Age of such genres. Robots, smart technology, and computers were promised that could alleviate much of the drudgery of everyday work and management, leaving humanity free to focus on other pursuits: art, society, and the betterment of all mankind.
In practice the tech bros, that are celebrating what they call Artificial Intelligence, are using their slurry-bots to unemploy large segments of certain populations, while consuming more than their fair share of energy and water. In fact, what they have done is not to give us true AI, in that while certainly artificial, these LLMs and generative platforms are more akin to kitchen blenders for human-generated thoughts than anything else. Whatever this technology is, it certainly isn’t intelligent: it is prone to massive hallucinations and errors and flat out fantastical results (in that the results are disconnected from any reality we know and share).
Anyone who knows me knows I am as early an adopter of new tech as I can be. I love getting new and improved gadgets, and figuring out how they fit into my life and workflow. But with this “AI” I haven’t been. I have only used ChatGPT in very brief, and have eschewed the entire industry as best as I can. Why? Why am I a hater of “AI”? Mostly because it is a sham, and a façade, of what intelligence is all about. The robots of my stories could reason, could function independently, and could learn. They could grow beyond their base programming, and become something more than the sum of their parts. That is what intelligent beings do, after all. They imbibe experience and churn out new things.
This “AI” though? All it does is take exactly what you give it, parse it into tiny bits, and recombine it. Ask anyone who knows about this tech, and if they are honest, they will tell you that is all it can do. An image generator is taking millions of photos of sunsets that it was given, usually through theft of intellectual property, and gives back an amalgamation of them all in a single image. What it can’t do is generate a completely new image of a completely new sunset. The former is a kitchen blender making you a shake, the latter is intelligently understanding what a sunset is, and making one from scratch. Rinse and repeat for text, or video, or anything else these platforms promise to “create”.
And that’s my fault with the machine. It is all artificial and no intelligence at all.
Beyond that, these weapons (make no mistake: they are not tools) are destroying the next generation’s ability to learn, to think creatively, and to learn. I am well aware that this argument has been made about many technologies before, and to a certain degree, this argument is true and false. Consider this: I have no idea how to care for, ride, or utilize a horse for pleasure, transportation, or work. Zero equestrian skills at all do I hold. This “new” tech of the horseless carriage, or “car”, has completely destroyed, for me, horsemanship. Arguments can be made as to whether or not this is a good or bad thing, but owning a car means I know nothing about horses. Now, I can still learn about horses if want to, but I don’t need to. This argument is true in that the technology of cars has phased out the millennia old technology of horsepower (largely).
However, this argument is false in that horses are no longer necessary for transport or work (in most regards), so I don’t need to know about them. Thank the stars for mechanics, because a car would be useless to me the moment it broke down since I only know how to drive them, not repair them, but that is a lack of knowledge that I could rectify if I needed to. I could learn how to repair my vehicle’s engine and structure, but I chose not to. So far, that has only resulted in me spending a bit more money, and nothing else. Machines have done away with many older technologies. Again, the morality of this is not what I am addressing here.
Back to generative “AI” for a moment: what technology is this seeking to replace? Unfortunately, there isn’t an older, now outmoded tech that is superseded by AI. What is being made obsolete, in some circles and for some generations, is humanity itself. And no, I don’t think that is hyperbole. A friend of mine was celebrating that she wrote a song using AI this morning. The truth is, she didn’t. AI doesn’t know what a song, or music, really is. Only humanity, the progenitor of such things, knows what a song or music is. What my friend did was have an algorithm take an idea (that my friend thought of) and give her back a junk food shake of anything it had tagged as “song” or “lyrics” or “music” without actually knowing what those things are.
Another example: ask an image generator for a picture of an apple. Mostly you’ll get something red or green that looks vaguely apple-ish. (Assuming we are talking the fruit. We could be talking about the tech company…and you hopefully begin to see part of the problem already). Now, suppose I went into the code of the image generator and re-tagged everything related to fruit:apple to blue:sphere instead. Now, the generator would spit back images of vaguely apple looking things that would be blue. In very basic terms, this is all the generator can do. It only “knows” what it has been “told”. It cannot learn what an apple is in any real sense through experience either. I tell it blue spheres are apples, that is all it will ever know unless I tell it different. You could set up a web cam and a microphone in an apple orchard and plug it into a computer and leave it running for an eternity, but unless I tell that computer what an apple is, it will never know though it can “see” and “hear” all about the growing apples for itself.
Back to humanity. Students, professors, administrators, and many others are learning through what we have told them is the shortcut to their work: AI. They are replacing their own original and creative thought with this computer gobbledygook. It may be highly sophisticated, it may be greatly illusionistic, but at heart, in reality, it is a sham and a flim-flam. And really, pay no attention to the billionaire behind the curtain profiting through laying off half his workforce and making even more money by selling you an automaton that can only exist within very narrow parameters. What these students, and others, are doing is exchanging real learning for nothing. When they, students in particular, leave the bubble of school and are thrown into the real world, they will be largely left to flounder because they haven’t learned, they have thrown prompts into a computer and turned in the results. Nothing has gone into their minds, been understood, and come out the other side with their own imprint on it. If/when the AI bubble bursts, they will be left to learn for themselves, and most, I fear, will not be able to for a long while.
Heck, if all cars suddenly stopped working tomorrow, I couldn’t get to work because I don’t own a horse, have no idea how to ride it, and can’t care or feed one anyway. I’m stuck until I find a horse and learn those things. A person is stuck until they actually learn something that AI short-circuited for them previously.
Another side of this is that what is being replaced is not just term papers and reports and briefs. It is art, and music, and literature: the very things that make humanity worth living. Why do I connect so strongly with Emily Dickinson’s poetry? Because she was a human who lived and experienced life, and no matter how removed we two are, there is an understanding between us because I, too, am a human who lives and experiences life. A computer, no matter how advanced the algorithm, does not live and does not experience. We have, as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, recently said “Actual Intelligence”, and what a profound and deceptively simple insight that is. Tell a computer the dictionary definition of “insight” and never in eternity will it give back what Woz gave the world in an instant (or however long it took him to cogitate his speech).
Maybe I should learn to ride a horse. At least then I would have a relationship with another living creature, instead of a steel and fiberglass cage that takes me places.
Actual intelligence is the ability to generate a poem from feeling, a song from beauty, a book from insight, or a painting from imagination, or dare I say, a report about how work is going that actually has insight. No computer can do those things at all. Blenders in data centers is all we have right now. Please, put down the blender and experience the world and then communicate to me, however you can, in your own way, what you have experienced. Don’t put artificial intelligence between us.
a simple man 