UNITED STATES—I have been hearing so much lately about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that it has started to annoy me to the core. There are people out there saying AI is so great, it is going to make your life easier. Then there are those who are noting the dangers of AI because it is a threat to jobs. I am not a fan of AI, I never have been and I never will be. Why? It makes us lazy. We rely way too much on technology and AI is starting to make us lazier than what we have been ever before.
First example, using AI to reply to an email, are you kidding me? You’re relying on someone else to reply to an email you received because you think there response will be more PC than what you might want to say. C’mon people, take a moment and think. What if AI crafts that email you’re too lazy to write and the response you get back is not pleasing. Guess what, you cannot argue with AI over a bad email that was sent because your name is tied to that. I truly don’t think people think about that, they look at the easier route.
Education is becoming a big issue with AI. Why? College students, high school students and middle school students using technology to craft up essays meaning the ideas are not theirs. This was something when I was an undergraduate in college was warned about. The tech wasn’t quite there then, but it absolutely is potent NOW. The notion of using ChatGPT is becoming such a norm with college students it’s scary.
Most classes you might have to write an essay here and there, but if you happen to be a English major like I was, you were writing an essay once a week or at least TWICE in a given month. Could a professor possibly pinpoint if someone plagiarized utilizing AI? The question is rather the teacher would even take the time to consider that thought. If they know students are doing so its likely, but do they have the actual time for it.
It would be beyond time consuming, and I don’t think teachers and/or educators want to deal with that, and it absolutely hurts the person using it more than anything. We can’t allow students to be lazy about writing an essay. The goal of an essay is three things 1) express your thoughts 2) critically think 3) analyze those thoughts. ChatGPT is not going to allow people to do that, it is a shortcut and that shortcut doesn’t help growth with one’s education horizons.
Is it bad that technology is making it easier for students to cheat? Yes, but here we are. I have heard about professors going back to the old method of writing and essay on a piece of paper. That is slightly smart, but you still have ChatGPT that a student could copy, but I don’t know if they’re willing to go through that amount of stress. AI is making it harder and harder for people to live without the evolution of technology that is to make our lives easier, which it is, but at the expense of us becoming too glued to that so-called technology.
The big threat with AI is job. I cannot tell you how many retailers that I’m visiting, where it seems self-check is the norm now. I hate self-check, I truly do. I don’t like the idea of scanning my own groceries. It is more time consuming and there is always a glitch with the damn computers. Guess who has to fix that issue, a human being. This notion of eliminating jobs and having the ‘computer’ do the work is dangerous. Hell, I even saw in another country where AI was used to create a reporter to generate the news. Yeah, to the journalists out there thinking they’re safe, you’re not safe either. In the movie realm, AI is being used to digitize extras in the background of a TV show or film, so actual actors no longer have to be hired. Damn, that is just brutal.
A computer is never going to be smarter than a human being, because the human being is the one who created the product that we have, but we seem to forget that. This notion of AI making our lives easier is making our lives harder. I should not be in a grocery store for an hour because all you have is self-checkout machines on all ends. Put a human there, let them scan the items and checkout the consumer, I bet you’re they’re a lot faster than a machine. We want self-driving cars, really? Do we not understand how dangerous that is?
Bad, bad idea, we need to think more about the dangers of AI so that we’re not allowing AI to dictate our lives, because if we don’t think, our lives will turn into the lives of those characters in the movie “I, Robot.”