AI should be restricted to the passenger seat
An opinion and stance on the benefits and pitfalls of so-called "artificial intelligence."
The fact that lines of code are capable of understanding human language and commands is fascinating. Yet ever since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and subsequent releases of other generative artificial intelligence, people have become further concerned. Artificial intelligence, or AI, includes software that relies on large language models to learn how to respond to prompts and commands given by a user. While AI is helpful in certain circumstances, there are worries concerning AI ethics, such as AI discouraging individuality and expression in writing and artwork.
It is an unfortunate part of our tragically flawed nature, but humans tend to be lazy. So, when a tool like ChatGPT or Bard displays abilities to write essays and articles, do homework, and create content in general, you know that many students, writers and content creators will be running straight to these tools to do that. By using ChatGPT, students and others have been robbing themselves of growing in their abilities to write, create and learn in general.
All artificially intelligent chatbots that I have tried at this point have a common Achilles’ heel. They are all clueless about how to cite sources and generate in-text citations. Looking back to my senior year of high school, ChatGPT would have given me a failing grade on my large research paper project in English class. At best, it would have caused it to be returned with large amounts of errors. The problem is that these chatbots cannot go and do what I will coin as “source shopping,” nor explain how such sources will relate to my paper.
We had to complete an annotated bibliography, something that a chatbot would hardly be able to create. Neither could it pick out academic sources. Finding scholarly articles was something that I even did wrong on my first try, which led to the reassignment of that part of the project.
Generated content is almost always the same, despite minor differences in arrangement. Unfortunately, results from chatbots are not very emotionally appealing. AI is not good with poems, storytelling and other forms of creative writing. Only a human being is capable of creating a masterpiece. Chatbots simply regurgitate mismatched ideas, borrowing from a bit of Poe, a pint of Hemmingway and an ounce of Charles Dickens, mixing together to form something atrocious and unworthy to be read.
However, as long as laziness is motivation, it is motivation enough to give up on individualism and authenticity. In a way, AI inhibits free speech. I do not see how it is all that much different from censorship if it causes us to throw our hands up when it comes to individual expression. Yet, I cannot bring myself to suggest that we completely wipe our lives of using something that has been baked into useful tools, such as search engines, for years now.
This conflict brings out an important distinction between AI which takes over the whole process, and AI which helps as a sidekick. For example, I find tools such as Grammarly and GitHub Copilot to be beneficial when writing essays/articles and code, respectively. Even ChatGPT and Bard can be helpful as brainstorming tools. These use cases are examples of AI acting as a helpful and effective aide. However, when AI generates content that could be used as if it were human-created, that is when things become dangerous.
This could become an even more devastating problem given its impact on future information. If published AI-generated content begins to fuel such chatbots and large language models, the content that it generates will tend to become all the more similar in style, reported findings and bias.
This is why human-created content is still crucial. Our curiosity about the world and our desire to understand should be what influences the creation and spread of ideas and information. Without human content, the internet could become overpopulated with un-individualistic fiction, rewritten findings on the same topics and uninteresting information. Writing gives us the ability to express ourselves as individuals beyond an average conversation. While AI can be helpful in certain scenarios, AI needs to stay out of the cockpit and get back into the passenger seat.