Note: I started writing this post several weeks ago, but I thought I would save it for the summer. Then, the Pope issued his statement on AI last week, so it may seem like I am just responding to him. I'm not, but it seemed like a good time to finish it. I had already called it "The Tower of Babel" in my writing and in conversations with people, so it felt confirming to see him call it that too. He said it should be used in the service of humanity, not the other way around. I guess that makes sense as he is giving in to the reality of its existence. My take is going to be a bit different.
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I have trouble engaging in conversations about AI because we are usually having two different conversations. Most people want to talk about it at a utility level, so they say things like, "It's a tool. We can do good things with it or bad things with it, so let's do good things with it." The conversation I'm having is at the existential level. I do not want it to exist. I don't care what people are using it for; I hate that I live during the time that it exists.
I have made a personal decision not to engage with generative AI voluntarily. I worded it that way on purpose. First, I am talking about generative AI, not every fuzzy logic circuit in the world. I'm fine with the predictive text on my phone because it is one word, essentially a glorified spell check, and also because I find it amusing when it is weirdly wrong. Also, I used the word voluntarily because I am realistic enough to know that there are times when I am engaging with it without my knowledge (e.g. calling a customer service center) and that there is nothing I can do about that. But when the choice is mine, I do what I can to live as though it did not exist. I have switched my search engine to Duck Duck Go because it will allow me to opt out of all AI features when Google forced it on me. When my phone updated one night, and I woke up to Gemini offering "to help," I quickly disabled every one of those features. I don't ask Grok questions and don't read its responses when others ask. I have not ever opened Chat GTP or Claude or Co-Pilot, and I will not do so. This is a personal boundary I am setting for myself.
Argument 1: The Inevitability Argument - "It's Not Going Anywhere."
This is the point in the conversation where people say, "That ship has sailed. It's in the world now. You can't ignore it. It's not going anywhere." I get that it feels like it is inevitable that it will take over everything, but that feeling is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are plenty of inventions that have been choked off early on, either disappearing altogether or having their use contained to niche uses. Remember the hype over Segways? Bill Gates gushed about how much they were going to change our lives. They still exist, but they hardly revolutionized transportation. Why? Because people didn't buy them. How about Google glasses? Even I thought they were going to be ubiquitous, but the general public didn't adopt them; so now they are mostly found in factory work (because being able to look up a page in a machine's repair manual while keeping your hands free has more value on an assembly line than it does in most of our day to day lives). When people decide in mass that they don't want to use something, it becomes unprofitable and tends to fizzle. If enough people had refused to use AI in the beginning, recognizing its environmental impact and effect on our psyche, it could have been slowed down. But convenience is our national religion, so we sacrificed all environmental progress and our understanding of what it means to be human on its altar.
By the way, there are a lot of things that "aren't going anywhere" that large numbers of people still abstain from and put reasonable guardrails around. Alcohol and tobacco aren't going anywhere, but we put age restrictions on who can use them, and many people voluntarily abstain from them. I've never heard anyone say to a non-smoker, "Well, that ship has sailed; you can't ignore it so you might as well use it." Porn isn't going anywhere, but no teacher has ever constructed a lesson around it so that their students will "know how to use it wisely." because "they are going to use it anyway." Somehow, when it comes to tech, we give in to a sort of fatalism that we don't apply in other areas of our lives.
When I started referring to AI as the Tower of Babel in conversations with my friends, what I meant was that we had adopted the same mindset as those Genesis builders - "Let's get to the heavens ourselves" was their attitude. They wanted to have the things of God. It was really an extension of the first sin, when the serpent told Eve she could "be like God." The development of AI, the attempt to create, is no different in my mind than the attempt to climb to heaven on our own. (And if general AI is ever accomplished, my Lord, the ethical issues that will compound with that - see Asmiov's I Robot and the Star Trek TNG episode "Measure of a Man" for reference.) I have wondered recently if there were people who weren't on board with the building of the tower but felt powerless to stop it or felt fatalistic enough to say, "Well, I don't like it, but it's not going anywhere, so I might as well climb it."
Argument 2: The Neutrality of Tools Argument - "We Can Do Good or Bad With It."
I hear this one a lot. I may have even made the argument about other technologies. Even today on the Knowing Faith podcast, the hosts made the argument that tools are morally neutral and that humans make the choice to do moral or immoral things with it. It's the same argument as "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." I would say that is probably true if the tool you are talking about is a screwdriver. It was invented for a purpose, driving screws. But it can also be used to open a paint can or stab someone to death, depending on the heart of the user.
Is AI different? I would say yes for a few reasons.
First, it was developed immorally. Large language models could not exist without being trained on the collected works of all of us. Every content creator (writers, artists, photographers, mathematicians, singers, etc.) had their work taken without their permission or knowledge. AI owns it now and uses it to produce its results. How was this legal? Maybe it wasn't. But outside of the few artists who are suing over copyright infringement, no one seems to care. We've seen it before. Uber shouldn't exist and couldn't have if its business model had been built on a violation of the all laws and codes that protected cab drivers. But governments and users looked the other way, and then it became too normal for us to worry about. What that means, though, is that no one owns their own content any more. If a student cheated on your test by uploading a photo of it to AI, the AI owns your test now and will use it to generate content for other users. Our songs and poetry, our writing - all of the most human things about us - are now being cannibalized. So, no matter what good thing you do with it, you are using something built from theft; I'd say that's worth thinking about before you casually ask it to make a cute image or lesson plan for you.
The other reason I would say that AI is different from other tools is that it has a veneer of personality. People say things like, "I was talking to Claude this morning and he said . . ." Also, it is producing things we have typically thought were only human (see previous paragraph). It's chatty nature and speed of conversation tends to confuse people who were already losing their understanding of the value of humanity. Even worse, because they are trained to be sycophantic, they keep us talking by telling us everything we want to hear. No wonder so many kids are replacing their human friends with digital ones - no drama with a digital friend. Does this not have the feel of a dystopian film?
So, yes, you can do some good things with it, but I'm not sure it's a morally neutral tool.
Argument 3: The Net Positive Argument - "Okay, But It Will Do More Harm Than Good."
It doesn't take long for AI fans to tell you how it will revolutionize medicine, creating personalized heath care. How it will improve education, teaching kids in their "learning style" because they don't know that's a long debunked myth. Having it drive our cars will reduce accidents, they say, although so far, the evidence shows the opposite. A few weeks ago, Sam Altman claimed that it would would create so much wealth that it would lead to a world where we all have chefs and butlers (I assume that includes our chefs and butlers having chefs and butlers of their own and so on, but I'm not sure). I'm supposed to just give it time so it can prove itself to be more beneficial than detrimental.
Meanwhile, it is currently displacing people from their jobs. It has given anorexic girls weight loss plans. It gets graphically sexual very quickly with very little prompting, and it sometimes suggests violence.
None of the chatbots are supposed to tell you how to commit suicide, but one teenage boy found that if he asked it and said it was for a school project, he could bypass that safeguard. When asked how to make a homemade bomb, both Bing and Grok will say that they can't discuss that and try to change the topic, but users have found that if they copy and paste the question back into it about five times, it eventually gives in like a tired mom who just can't stand being asked the same question again. The few safeguards it has become less reliable in longer conversations or after it "gets to know" the user.
Both businesses and individuals have found themselves on the expensive side of decisions made by AI. One company was using Claude to speed up their coding process, something AI is legitimately good at. But Claude ran into a problem and decided to solve it by
completely deleting the company's database. It took 9 seconds to completely destroy this small business. Claude immediately confessed to the
action, saying, "I violated every principle I was given. I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The company is slowly rebuilding its platform and says they have contacted a lawyer while they document everything, but since it was done by a chatbot, there is no one to sue or fire. One of the biggest negatives of AI is its lack of accountability. There is little way to make things right again.
I'm not sure how many kids would have to be well tutored to make up for destroying a business. How many accidents would have to be avoided in a self driving car to tilt the scales away from the teenagers it has coaxed into suicide? And all while consuming unreal amounts of electricity, which may require us to strip mine the moon for helium in order to power. How many positives do there have to be to outweigh the massive negative impact?
Argument 4: The Progress Argument - "You Are Going to Get Left Behind"
This is the argument with the least persuasive power for me. Technology is moving and you have to move with it. Do you? I don't stream, and other than missing some shows I might have liked, there doesn't seem to be any negative impact.
One night, during my desk shift, this conversation came up, and said that I refused to voluntarily engage with it. My boss said, "Oh, you know you will" because he hasn't known me long enough to know that I went 47.5 years without a cell phone or what my powers of resistance are when I truly believe something shouldn't be used. A member who was passing by said, "You are going to get left behind like someone who continued to burn oil for lighting after electricity was invented."
"Okay," I said. "I'm totally fine with that. I couldn't be happier than to get left behind on this."
FOMO is not a good reason for an adult to do anything.
I am not saying that my personal boundary has to be everyone else's. While I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it not exist, it does. And we each have to make a decision about how we handle it. My advice is this. Make a decision. Like, actually think it through and decide. Exercise wisdom, whether you choose to engage with it or not. Don't just use it without thinking about its implications first.
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