When is it Time to Stop with AI?

 "Gemini, live my life for me."

"Ok, got it." Your phone whirls to life, responding to emails, scheduling appointments, booking nights out with your friends, going on dates with your significant other, accomplishing goals in your name, living the dreams that you only imagined you could. All around you, your life has been lived out for you while you stare at this 5 by 7 illuminated screen. All these accomplishments and achievements done by a small portable computer under your name - but what have you done?

We live in a world where technology is ever changing, "advancing" daily and making our lives "easier", but at what cost? Technology is getting progressively faster, smarter and more complex in order to make our lives easier, but by simply letting AI handle all the "basic" tasks in life, we forgot or are in-experienced at doing the basics. 

At first AI just seemed like a bizarre "ask Dall-E to generate a bunch of silly word prompts into disturbing glops" 

But now we have images that take a discerned trained eye to decipher what is real vs AI, and even worst, the technology has moved beyond photo collages to being implemented in every day life. It's almost baffling the amount of AI that is being pushed to be implemented in our daily lives and how readily available it is. 

When you wake up in the morning and roll over to check your phone, most people have on facial recognition, so your phone scans your face and unlocks it based on the profile. Siri/Alexa or Google Assistant, which are virtual assistants used to help you with overall general assistance, will greet you, tell you the weather, remind you of your task list or events for the day. Pretty much, these program know everything that goes on in your day. At this point, you might spend a few moments before getting out of bed to scroll through social media for a bit. But in this day and age, all the content we are fed is based on an AI algorithm that personalizes our feeds to suggest content that will promote products or advertisements. Essentially we inhale a plethora of ads before we even get out of bed. Now what if you needed to look something up? A question that sprung up about a dream you had last night, or an idea that you might implement at work? By going to search tools like Google or Safari, the AI search algorithms will cull through the top suggested results to calculate what a general answer would like like and summarize it for you. 

So you finally get up, get in the car and head to work but there's a detour because of an accident. You fire up the GPS on your phone or your in-car AI navigator and it detects the best route to go to avoid any further issues and arrive to work at a reasonable time.

Once you get to your desk at work, you're overwhelmed by a mass amount of emails and you just want to plow through them as fast possible. Luckily for you there are AI writing programs that help summarize the email, write a response for you and changes the tone so that you can sound professional and educated. Now that the bombardment of emails is over, its time to focus on work, which involves reviewing charts and summarizing reports and such. Thankfully, you know a few programs that can do that work for you. 

After getting all that hard labourious work done, it's time to start planning your weekend with your friends. But how do you hold a conversation with your friends about having a night out, you've never been able to make plans with your friends before without the help of your trusty phone. You pull out your phone and ask ChatGPT to write responses to your friends and plan your fun adventures.

This is only a small example of the daily use of AI, it's expanding everyday but hopefully some of those programs raised a red flag for you. We have gotten comfortable relying on AI to do all the "simple" tasks such as answering emails, doing our job, responding to friends for us, that we are losing sight of how to do such simple tasks ourselves, making us simply vessels for whatever use AI has for us next. We have become submissive to letting computers do all the work for us, that we don't know how to do anything for ourselves.

According to researchers, sited in this thesis "a user’s task-specific self-confidence and confidence in GenAI are predictive of whether critical thinking is enacted and the effort of doing so in GenAI-assisted tasks. Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking,"

While the use of AI can be used for eliminating remedial tasks, the long term effect of simplification only seems to be damaging us as a society.

Jobs have been lost time and time again to AI programs or systems that remove the need for human interactions or human involvement. For as wonderful as it might seem to give the tedious jobs to the computer, it has taken away a large chunk of work opportunities for actual people. This creates more problems in the economy than good and promotes poverty if no one can find a job because computers are doing it for free instead.

As stated before, AI has advanced past making morphos blobs and has moved into more incriminating territories. Many image or video generators can now create rather convincing videos or "AI models" of celebrities, politicians, you name it and use the power of AI voice modulars to create what is called deepfakes. Many of these deepfakes have been used as a form of blackmail or forgery and it's landed innocent people in trouble because it's becoming increasingly hard to tell what is real or fake.

There is an overall problem rising with the use of AI, that being human empathy and intelligence. The amount of reliance that society currently has on AI and being a crutch for reading and responding on our behalves, on creating art, music and entertainment for our amusement, doing our homework, figuring out how to respond to our co-workers, writing our reports for us; generally the amount of permission we have given to AI to do nearly everything for us has become unsettling. We have put our trust into something that not only is taking the enjoyment of life away from us, but this AI "Intelligence" is also wrong about a lot more than we know.

Google's AI Overview at one point told users that you should eat at least one rock a day and that it was healthy for us. Unfortunately this is not the only bizarre example of AI Overview being incorrect and feeding us the wrong information at a glance. But this issue truly lies in the fact that people in general lack the ability to do research, to challenge information and arrive at their own conclusions. We are being fed information from AI and people lack the ability to discern for ourselves what is fact or fiction. By allowing AI to do all sorts of simple tasks for us, we have lost the ability to problem solve, to rationalize and simply do the most basic of tasks that make us human. 

What do we do to combat this? We need to stop using AI for everything, just because it's simple or "something we don't want to do" doesn't mean we should never learn how to do it. We need to stop relying on auto-correct to fix our spelling and try to learn to spell words on our own. We need to stop using AI writing programs to write our papers for us, answer our emails, summarize our conversations for us. We need to stop believing the first thing we read, the first thing we see and start creating our own works before we lose what it means to be human - humanity. 

Technology has advanced, mostly for the good, but we teeter dangerously on the line of becoming vegetative vessels, enslaved to whatever the algorithm feeds us next. We need to start living for ourselves once again.