What frustrates you most about artificial intelligence?
For me, the answer is easy: All the boxes popping up asking if I want help writing, whether it’s an email or a story or a column.
No, I do not want help writing. When I write, I am expressing my own thoughts, not what a probability machine thinks my thoughts are, or what they should be.
More than that, for me, writing and thinking go hand in hand. I’m often not really sure what my thoughts are until I’ve set them down and can reread them, rearrange them, critique them.
Only then am I comfortable with the idea that I know what I think.
The process isn’t done then, of course. Because then it’s time to see how I can improve my written work, how I can better express those thoughts that I’ve come to understand.
Even if I believed that a server in some data center — a place wasting both water and energy so that people can see what they would look like as a Star Wars character or a flower — knows the inside of my head better than I do, I still would not want it to do the work for me. Because I like doing the work.
Writing, like visual art, performance art, even crafts and trades from cooking to carpentry, is an act of creation. To put it loftily, to create is to participate in the work of the Divine. To put it more simply, to create is fun.
An analogy I’ve seen recently asks whether you would ask a professional athlete at the top of their game whether they wanted to stop actually playing, since their video game avatars can imitate what they would do well enough.
Of course they wouldn’t, because their video game characters are not them. They’re not people, with all the messy unpredictability that goes with that. Maybe the star player makes a bonehead play and loses the game; maybe a journeyman does something that no one — not even him — thought he could do. That’s why they play the games.
I’m no technophobe, and I know AI in some forms is here to stay. But I don’t need an AI chatbot assistant to direct me when I’m looking for something on a company’s website; an accurate menu will do the job more quickly and with less frustration. And I think AI programs that are designed to function as “friends” to people are an abomination, because they lack what it takes to be in a human relationship — namely, being human, made in the image and likeness of God — and to tell people who are immature or lonely or desperate enough for contact that this is the same thing is to tell them a lie.
Then again, AI is becoming known for sharing false information, whether it’s imagining books that don’t exist for a newspaper summer reading section, hallucinating quotes from articles that do exist in academic work or a search engine misstating how long the Cubs recent losing streak was.
As a Sox fan, you can be sure I’d never do that. Just like I never would have used AI to write this column.