As the AI juggernaut wraps its tentacles around us, the question is not so much whether it will bring wondrous new automation, applications and gadgets - that is a given - but more about what we will give up or cede in allowing technology to create, manage and control more of our lives. And most importantly, the question is whether what we lose is a reasonable trade for what we gain and whether it is simply another step in our evolution as a species, not to be feared, or a slow descent into a more passive and meaningless existence.
Consider this: When you receive any significant message from someone, whether personal or business, there is now no way to know whether it was generated by an LLM or written personally by the sender. The sincere note of thanks, the profession of friendship or love, the sharing of thoughts or opinions – are they the expression of the writer’s thoughts or feelings or simply a chatbot’s response to an instruction? We simply cannot know, and it seems likely that as time goes on it will almost always be the chatbot. That, to me, is already a profound loss.
The use of chatbots to create something written, whether an essay, a letter, a poem or a song, denies the ‘creator’ the effort, the thinking, the research, the creative struggle that would otherwise have been necessary to craft what the chatbot produces. And yes, of course, that doesn’t mean that a chatbot can’t be used to ‘augment’ or aid someone’s creative work rather than fully compose it, but imagine the temptation to rely heavily on AI and the high probability that most will succumb to that temptation.
What future student will learn to write effectively, much less beautifully? It takes hours and hours to learn how to write well. Think of the hundreds or thousands of pieces of writing one struggles to create throughout high school and college, not to mention the personal missives one sends via mail, email or notes. Who will take the time and the trouble to do this now? Only a very few. Is this an unnecessary skill in the AI ‘best of all possible worlds’ of the future? Perhaps, but I believe losing this skill is a heavy price to pay.
And if one no longer writes, then we will no longer have to struggle to analyze and deeply understand a topic and organize our thoughts to be able to express them articulately. Yes, we will have the deep analysis and summary that a chatbot will give us, but it will have been cheaply obtained and we will have been robbed of the critical thinking that is such an important part of any creative or learning process.
In the end, if we rely on chatbots that have been trained on what humans take years to develop, are we not cheating ourselves of that process of development? Aren't we taking a huge shortcut that will certainly limit our own capabilities by pretending that when chatbots obey our commands they represent us?
Chatbots can create other things – graphics, photos, videos, films, and music for example. And in the near future it is very possible that their brethren, robots with AI/LLM capabilities, may be able to do almost anything humans do now and more. Will this empower humans to be creative in new, exciting ways? Perhaps, but it could also commoditize creativity and result in an avalanche of shiny things that have little substance behind them. We already see this.
Providing tools for humans to be more creative is one thing, but mimicking human creativity through a massive training process and then independently creating things with input from a human has the potential to make human creativity superfluous and overwhelm the world with cheap and gaudy thrills.
We can hope that people will seek out true human creativity, and I can envision an underground of noble creative spirits carrying the torch of humanity like the oral book reciters of Fahrenheit 451. Perhaps after a few years the LLMs will be rejected like foreign tissue from the body of humanity and we will learn once again to express ourselves without the addictive aid of a seductive but treacherous interloper.
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