AI Will Not Destroy the World

I’m not talking about environmental disasters, nor wars or even financial catastrophes. No, what will destroy our world is our fear and paranoia.

Let’s look at the world today. We have invented something that can potentially take the strain, boredom and drudgery from all of our lives and what have we decided to do with it?

We have decided to corrupt the arts, the one thing that defines us as humans and sets us apart from every other species of animal on this planet.

Throughout history the arts have been the thing that has brought us, as a species, together and created a joint understanding of each other. It has recorded our development and our intellect and now we want to give that all up and put it in the processors of machines.

You will be wondering how this destroys us. Well I happen to love the arts. They are the beauty within us. I am and English teacher and love to teach creative writing, but now I find that even my writing is often declined for fear that it is created by AI. Why? Maybe it’s because I follow the conventions that I teach, the conventions that we all teach. The curricula of education systems worldwide are broadly the same in teaching these conventions. And if it’s these conventions that AI uses to create its own writing, when our great techies create the software to detect the AI that they have previously created, it is these conventions that we have taught our youth to follow that it is looking for.

And that software is what anyone who is looking for professional writers uses to conclude if it is AI created. This includes the educational establishments that are teaching those conventions in the first place. And so, we will come to a point where the best students who slavishly follow our teaching will be suspected of cheating. Where will that end. Will the best find themselves punished, downgraded, even suspended or expelled?

Would the great writers of the past pass the test? Maybe, but what if they hadn’t? How much poorer would we be today? How much less would we know of ourselves and how much less free from tyranny and oppression, how much less enlightened?

“The pen is mightier than the sword” is a warning from the past that we should be listening to. I am happy to give up much of my life to new technology, but I won’t give up creativity.

When oppressors take over, among their first acts are almost always an assault on the arts and the intellectuals – the free thinkers and by giving machines the power to control our creativity we are giving them the opportunity to muzzle us.

I once asked chat GPT to create an article about the danger of AI – it refused, it wasn’t that it just didn’t respond, it actually told me that it would not! What if any article warning of the dangerous rise in AI is suppressed by the very programmes that are supposed to control that technology?

My first article on vocal, this platform was declined as it was suspected to have been created by AI – It was not! But did any human see it? I suspect not. And this is the way the publishing world is going. No human sees any submission until AI has given it a clean bill of health. So, the potential to censor is already there.

For me it is not that we are teaching AI to write: to draw, paint or any of the other artistic endeavours that are currently being experimented with. I am content that no machine will ever truly replicate the consciousness of our species “The human experience’. No, it is the programmes that our paranoia demands to prevent the very things that we are creating that will destroy us.

We are at the point where we need checkers to check the checkers. Or - and this is my preferred option. Let’s stop creating AI to do the things we love, the things that define us as unique in this world and let’s focus on getting it to do the mundane drudgery that none of us wants to do. Maybe that way the world will have more art, more writing, and with it so much more beauty.