Here Comes the Anti-AI Butlerian Jihad!
What popped into my head when I read neuroscientist Erik Hoel’s cautionary essay A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture in the March 29, 2024 New York Times was my first college statistics course. Students used a roomful of mechanical calculating machines to calculate sums of squares. When everyone’s machine was going the din was deafening. I learned to use the room only when there were few other students present—and much quieter!
If we have to avoid using AI tools, is that what we’ll have to return to? Or maybe we’ll be forced to avail ourselves of the computing power of the giant “human abacus” like the one demonstrated during one of Netflix’s 3 BODY PROBLEM’s “stable eras.”
Of course I exaggerate, but much of what Hoel describes is disturbing. It’s to the point now when I go on Linkedin I can’t always tell when a stranger who reaches out to me is real or AI-generated.
Nevertheless, there is also a disturbing core about the possibility of a backlash: the possibility that we’ll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is seen most directly in the use of AI tools like ChatGPT to help generate text. I’ve personally experimented with using ChatGPT to edit my own writing but also to generate text requiring more sophisticated rule based processing. We’ve all heard about the problem of AI-generated “hallucinations” which reinforce in my own thinking the importance of human oversight on both the input and output side. But there has to be a tipping point between the benefeits of using AI tools to generate content and the cost of managing their safe use.
While it’s likely that some thorny AI issues will eventually be resolved (e.g., unauthorized use of intellectual property in training AIs and the related issue of potential privacy invasion involving personal data) the need for oversight to control for “hallucinations” as well as nefarious uses involving deception will continue.
How that will play out is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile perhaps the best course is to always make clear when and where AI tools are being used.
Copyright 2024 by Dennis D. McDonald. The above graphic was generated by Microsoft Designer in response to a variation of the prompt, “Please generate a graphic illustrating a room full of old fashioned calculating machines making a powerful noise while operating.”