AI is not sentient. At the end, it’s just an algorithm which spits out an answer to your question.
Soon enough, people would forget how to read. Some of them already have forgotten what’s the last book they read. Not just books, I have asked people, and they can’t even recall the last ‘gossip’ they have read on a website like Buzzfeed or an article on NYTimes.
Yes, I’m talking about people who already did these things on a regular basis, and used to say that reading was a really big part of their life.
AI isn’t juicier. What AI is, however, is a lazy wannabe friend. Instead of a Google or a Duckduckgo search, people are asking AI.
It’s almost like ChatGPT is their new search engine. I have seen it pinned and bookmarked on many people’s browsers that I work with, and some even set it to open as the tab which your browser opens when you launch.
AI gives you less things to read, instead of making you scramble through thousands of lines on Wikipedia. I might think, “This is the way! I wonder why I didn’t have this all my life. I have cut back on research time, and now I can focus on bigger tasks.”
In the short term, this sounds like a goldmine. AI reading your mind when it comes to context switching, AI writing your essay, AI giving you therapy advice. But as you have seen in most Hollywood movies and in real life, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch, isn’t there?
Here the catch isn’t that AI is the enemy. Oh, AI has started taking over human colonies after it became sentient. It’s now overwriting the government’s rules and killing lives. Not that kind of a crazy catch, though this kind of a dystopian world is totally possible in the near future.
The catch is, the essay AI just wrote for you, and the same essay you’re just going to turn in? It’s not going to be totally accurate. Even if it’s more or less scratching the point, you have to fact-check each and every word and sentence this AI just wrote for you in the fraction of seconds, plus the typing effect.
But the time it’s going to take you to fact-check? It’s going to be minutes, if not hours and days. At which point, you’d have found out countless errors which AI just blatantly put in, and thinking that you were just going to submit that? The sheer horror.
You would be frustrated and feeling betrayed, thinking, “Why did I even use AI if I just had to spend hours editing and fixing the wrongs? It would have been easier just writing it myself in the first place.”
This realisation might come to you after you catch your AI red-handed, feeding you a lie. Or guess what? The realisation might never come. Oftentimes, I have asked AI straightforward answers like, “Why is the sky blue?” I mean, I know it is blue, but why is it really blue? Simple questions which don’t have the simplest answers, but these are things you might have wondered about as a child, or even a bit in the dark as a curious adult.
AI would then tell me all about how sunlight is made up of all colors in the visible spectrum, and how particles scatter all the colored lights like red, yellow, green, but not the colors violet and blue. Why? Because bluish colors have shorter wavelengths and they get absorbed by the molecules in the atmosphere. Then they scatter those lights in different directions, so that we can now see a sky that is just blue. But as you know, skies also appear shades of pink and orange sometimes.
That’s like an entire science lesson, but children would keep asking why and you’ll never be able to get to the bottom of this.
As a human who doesn’t know the answer, or doesn’t want to keep answering, they’ll just say, “That’s a really good question kid, of which I don’t know the answer to.” In other words, if they’re decent human beings, they’ll say something along the lines of, “No, I don’t know. You can find it out ourself one day, I’m sure someone else knows the answer”.
But AI? I have had my fair share of usage with it when I was trying to prepare for certain exams, and let me tell you, it was not so decent. I mean, I guess you could think I was crazy for trying to get decency out of an AI which is far from being a human, but yes, I needed help so I did it.
It’s as sad as someone telling you that due to our environment being royally fucked up, we won’t have winter seasons anymore.
Chill out. The actors will see themselves out.