#24 Machine learning is making us forget
Over-reliance on AI is undermining independent thought and destroying self-confidence.
Whenever I think about artificial intelligence, I’m reminded of a famous quote on technology from Jeff Goldblum’s character Dr Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” he says of the move to bring dinosaurs back to life.
And just as resurrecting prehistoric beasts the size of buses warrants a reasonable question of motive, so too does a range of AI-generated content. Why does Elon Musk’s Grok, for example, have the ability to doctor images without a subject’s consent? Scroll through the hellscape that is Twitter these days and you don’t have to move very far before you see a bloke demanding the AI tool sexualise a photograph of an unsuspecting woman. “Put her in a bikini,” prompts the creep; Grok complies and someone’s privacy is obliterated within seconds.
And what about intellectual copyright? Many large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, have been trained on millions of books and articles, without the permission of the authors – myself included. Is that right? Is that fair?
Where legal challenges to this tune have been mounted, the AI companies have tended to win because judges have ruled their technology is sufficiently “transformational”. In other words, the ends are seen to justify the means. And on the rare occasions where AI companies have lost their cases, the payouts they’ve been forced to make are drops in an ocean when you look at their overall wealth.
AI is, I suppose, indeed transformational. It has certainly changed the world. It has not so much crept into, as it has crashed through the wall of every industry. But I don’t think AI has changed the world for the better. While I can concede some merits in hyper-accelerating mundane tasks and blending multiple software functionality into a single platform, I am increasingly of the belief that AI is actually a net negative for society.
AI has made people lazier and less capable of independent thought. It has created a culture that prioritises speed and convenience at the expense of process and accuracy.
Worse still, such is the prevalence of AI, such is AI’s establishment as the modern default, that people have now come to assume that anything that is well-written or sounds polished, must necessarily be AI-generated.
This brings me to my irritated note at the end of last week’s post. I do not write like AI. AI writes like me and the millions of other human writers its developers stole from.
Substack’s AI detector, like all AI detectors, is flawed. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in whatever AI “score” you might see on someone’s posts on this platform. To this point, the works of William Shakespeare and the book of Genesis have recently been flagged as AI-generated by supposed detection tools.
But while the accuracy of AI detection software may itself be disputed, the need for more honesty and authenticity in creative spaces must not be. There is too much AI slop out there and it’s exhausting. Real creative endeavour – consider art, literature or music – is worthwhile. It’s what makes life so beautiful. And before they pipe up, let me ask, what do you STEM graduates do with your spare time? You read, you watch, you listen.
Still, none of this is to disparage science or technology. I am not a Luddite; I am not anti-tech. But I do believe that the focus of science and technology should be on advancements in medicine, cleaner energy, transport, infrastructure, and preserving wildlife – you know, things that could benefit the whole planet.
We don’t need AI that can draw, paint, compose music or write prose and poetry. If you want to become a better writer, read more. Please don’t stand on someone else’s shoulders and call yourself tall.
Look, I get it. AI is easy. It’s not just the low-hanging fruit; it’s as if someone is personally feeding you grapes while you lie down on a sofa. I really can’t argue against how simple it is to now source information, brainstorm or do deep research in seconds. And perhaps I shouldn’t be so extreme as to encourage people to boycott the tech entirely. After all, most of the tech that preceded AI was also disruptive. RIP Sony Walkman. RIP Ask Jeeves.
But surely there must be boundaries. Surely there must be limits of acceptable use. If not necessarily on moral grounds, then as part of maintaining your own cognitive abilities.
Frankly, technological unemployment and the talk of AI taking people’s jobs doesn’t worry me half as much as the prospect of future generations being incapable of working or living without it. Of not knowing how to make small talk, of not knowing how to ask for directions, of not being able to form their own opinions and argue them.
To borrow from Josh Fehernet’s excellent essay in Monocle on this subject: “Perhaps it’s time for journalists – and others unnerved by change – to stop moaning about the precarity of their professions and start making a better case for their relevance.”
If you lived and worked before AI, you can live and work after it. And if you’re growing up in this age where AI is normal, I’d implore you to develop skills outside of it, because there is a very real chance that the bubble will burst, and that the sentiment expressed in this blog will grow louder.
In 2023, in a column for Raconteur, I predicted that a premium, both financial and cultural, would be placed on things that are verifiably human-made. I stand by it now more than ever.
If you or your business is overly reliant on AI, the best thing you can do is to take steps not to be. It’s OK, I guess, to automate or accelerate certain superficial tasks, but even then, you should still know how to do them manually, just in case.
Don’t be daunted, though. If human beings before you have managed to design and build skyscrapers, imagine sprawling fantasy worlds, create languages, or compose art and music that still move people centuries later, then I promise you can write an email without Copilot. You’re going to be fine.
A NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: I’m going to slow down with this Substack. Weekly output is getting on top of me, alongside my job and a whole host of adult responsibilities. I’ll still post, just not as often. But if you enjoy my writing, please do trawl through the archive. You can also find my work in many newspapers and magazines.