Have we created a monster?

One LinkedIn post recently inadvertently summed up the challenge we are facing around generative AI. It’s opening line was: “Reckon AI can help you with homework and make you cry?”

The post went on to describe how this person’s daughter was doing a school research project about World War 2, and she decided to help by asking ChatGPT to write her daughter a letter from her great grandfather who served in WW2.

I was struck by two things about this; why did she ask ChatGPT to help in the first place, and how can something that you know was created by a machine make you cry?

Apparently, a recent study found that AI poetry rated better than poems written by humans. So what? Is there any point at all to use AI to write poetry, or any form of creative writing? It’s just going to be a computer-generated amalgam of words that might read well on the surface, but beyond that there is nothing. No heart, no feeling, no perspective, no emotion, no individual’s view on the world. Do we really want to fill our lives with content created by the machine?

The ‘helping with the homework’ aspect to the post is equally disturbing. Why didn’t she spark her own daughter’s creativity and imagination by suggesting that she write that letter from her great grandfather? A University of Melbourne tutor wrote about this. Fifty-two percent of her students were detected as using AI to complete some or all their first written assessment of 2024, and that only got worse over the year. She asks what is the point of university education and a degree at the end of it:

“… a degree in many faculties is a waste of money in terms of everything but earning (rather than learning) potential.”

I’m no saying that there is no place for AI. Absolutely there is! I use it every day. I use the automatic background removal function in Canva, and the background extension function in Photoshop to touch up photos. That saves so much time from the old days of deep etching. I can’t imagine going back to having to transcribe my own interview recordings. Now I can use Otter, RingCentral and a host of other AI tools to do that for me.

We just need to draw the line. Or multiple lines in lots of different fields. Don’t even get me started on the impact that the proliferation of AI is having (and going to have) on the environment. AI data centres’ growing demands for power and water are alarming to say the least. Professor Kate Crawford illustrated the problem clearly: each interaction with ChatGPT was the equivalent of pouring half a litre of water on the ground. The article also states that GenAI has “tripled the energy requirements of the entire tech sector in just two years”.

* Pictured above is an early Photoshop AI experiment of mine that went horribly wrong …