Yesterday I spoke to an AI agent on the phone. At least, I think it was an AI. It did not announce itself as such; it called itself “Dane.” But maybe it wasn’t an AI? It was so humanoid that I wasn’t sure, so I spoke to it as though it could be a human, albeit one who was extremely adept at mixing conversational speech with call center script. Aside from a general AI vibe I got from Dane, it did some specific things that made me think it wasn’t human. I thought about listing them here, but I don’t want to. And now I’m realizing, perhaps for the first time, that everything I post here is already being digested and catalogued by non-humans.
Which of course I already knew. Surely there have been web crawlers as long as there have been search engines, identifying keywords and indexing my blog alongside every other thing posted to the internet.
If you have a blog: have you ever learned that someone unexpected reads your posts? Once, years ago, I learned that a colleague or maybe a classmate of my husband had stumbled across my blog. Obviously, that has always been possible; my posts are public. I write because I want to be read. I do try to remember that my words are public, and I do self-edit my posts in some ways. It’s not as though this person did anything nefarious, or even (as far as I know) commented on my posts or kept reading for any length of time. (If you’re still reading, hi!) It still felt odd, though, as if someone were reading over my shoulder. (Why it doesn’t feel that way all the time, I don’t know. You’re reading it, aren’t you? And that not only doesn’t bother me, it makes me happy!) Looking “being read” right in the face makes me squirmy. The same feeling applies when I think about an AI scouring the web for ideas about how to be more human, and landing on this post, and tucking my thoughts away for future instruction.
I started out thinking this would be a Five for Friday post, but apparently I want to talk about AI some more. It’s a topic I think about many times a day. It’s a subject I don’t know a whole lot about. It’s something that terrifies and fascinates me.
Let’s start here: The environmental implications of AI are massive and horrifying. Full stop.
A while back, I had a friend who seemed obsessed with LLMs. She used them all the time, and our conversations often included her saying things like, “I asked ChatGPT and it said…” or “I just put all my thoughts about X into Claude and it suggested…” She seemed to derive real insight from her interactions with AI. Sometimes, when we exchanged everyday gripes or concerns, she suggested that I turn to one of the LLMs for answers or clarity.
I occasionally use Chat GPT, and I do so with tremendous trepidation. I do not like what it learns about me when I ask it for things. I do not like the humanoid quality of its responses. I do not like that it makes assumptions and intuitive leaps. I do not like the image, in my head, of all the resources it’s depleting just to give me a list of books that meet a series of very specific requirements.
At a work event for my husband’s practice, some of his colleagues were discussing AI and its various applications in the medical field. Providers ask AI to summarize patient visits, which can optimize their time doing paperwork and allow them to interact with patient instead of focusing on their computers. Surgeons operate robotic tools remotely. AI can help spot pre-cancerous polyps in endoscopy videos.
Requests for my freelance work have declined in recent years. Occasionally, I decide that I want to earn more money and I look for jobs. Usually, my searches are for remote positions because I dislike wearing real clothes any more than absolutely necessary. My entire career has been in writing adjacent fields: editing, copywriting, content creation. Editing and writing are what I love to do; they are my primary skills. The job search engines turned up posting after posting after posting for various methods of training AI to edit and write.
(I use Google and Gmail every day. I click on words in my Kindle and in online content to see their definitions. I employ spellcheck in Word.)
Two men at my neighbor’s barbecue chatted about their use of AI at work. One uses it to generate marketing copy. The other uses it to write emails to customers. They agreed that AI is so much cheaper and easier and more efficient than hiring an expert to do those tasks. They noted that the output isn’t quite as good. They each shrugged.
I disabled the predictive text function on my phone. I disabled Gemini in my Gmail accounts. I refuse to look at the AI Overview in my Google search results. I feel principled and righteous. I feel irritated because I have to do so much scrolling to find a reputable source for my inquiries and I misspell so many words when I text and I overlook emails from my mom because my inbox is so clotted with advertisements.
One of my writing friends recently told me that she was quitting ChatGPT cold turkey. She had been using it to help her brainstorm ideas, refine sentences, identify plot holes… but she’d been horrified by the number of articles she’d been reading about AI use in the publishing industry. She also felt her brain wasn’t working as quickly or as deftly as it had before she’d started using AI.
(Apple Maps tells me how to get to the airport and friends’ houses and medical offices. Siri tells me what to expect from the day’s weather. Presumably nearly every airplane I’ve ever been on utilizes autopilot.)
I worry about: My lack of marketable skills. The various ways AI might impact my child’s future: her career prospects, her critical thinking skills, her mental health. The longterm effects of the systematic mutilation of our environment. Doctors relying on AI to the point of missing symptoms or eroding their own skills. Deepfakes and AI scams and chatbot-fueled psychosis.
A professor friend of mine laments the increase of AI-generated work among her students. She uses AI to pinpoint whether an assignment has been completed using AI.
Sometimes I think that it’s shortsighted and stubborn to resist a technology that could offer real improvements in efficiency and scope of knowledge. Sometimes I feel like a side character in a dystopian story, being propelled inexorably toward the collapse of humanity.
(Netflix recommends shows I might like. Google Lens helps me identify plants, and Merlin Bird ID recognizes the birds I’m listening to. Shazam tells me which song is playing on my Apple playlist of “summer songs.” My phone’s Clean Up tool removes blemishes from my photos. A robot vacuums my floors and another robot cleans my pool.)
Elevator operators, lamplighters, crossing sweepers, linotype operators, travel agents, video store clerks. I’m not the first person whose career prospects have dwindled or disappeared due to technological innovation. I won’t be the last.
There’s nothing new I can add to the conversation. There’s SO MUCH about AI I don’t know and haven’t considered. But it’s something I think about all the time and it’s something that has insinuated itself into all of our lives.
I don’t know if I can be against AI when I use it so frequently in everyday life. But I certainly don’t feel good about AI. Outsourcing our critical thinking to AI can lead to faulty conclusions (“cognitive surrender”) and stunt our capacity for analytical reasoning (“cognitive offloading”). Generative AI models and the data centers used to power them have clear, measurable environmental consequences (one estimate I read says the same query on ChatGPT uses five times the energy than a web search). There are the slippery moral, ethical, and philosophical issues of AI consciousness (or not). But AI can also increase efficiency, automate daily routines, facilitate learning, summarize and analyze vast amounts of data, and and and and.
I don’t want to contribute to the depletion of our water sources, the impairment of our ability to think, the decline of civilization. I don’t want to be left behind.
(My phone labels unknown numbers as potential spam. Canva’s AI tool alters graphics to my specifications. Google AI Mode generates a list of articles about AI.)
Some AI use may be “better” than others. But where’s the line?
I would be so very interested to hear about your thoughts regarding and experiences with AI. Do you use it at work? In your personal life? What worries you or excites you the most? This is a judgment-free zone; I feel like we are all grappling with how and when and why and at what cost.
I’m very concerned about brain rot with AI; I find that even using my computer or phone to check things makes me lazy about thinking or trying to remember names or facts. I know I use AI although nothing like my boyfriend who is crazy about ChatGPT. The awful part for me is that my usage of it isn’t deliberate; it’s imbedded in so much of our phone and computer programs. I hate it and WANT to avoid it. But it makes life easier sometimes. I worry about the future employment world that my daughters and grandsons are facing. 🙁
Yes, the brain rot. I think it’s so hard to find a balance between allowing these wonderful technological advances help us and using them as a crutch.
Oh what a timely post, Suzanne. I’ve been thinking about the use of AI a lot. I don’t want to villainize AI completely because I think it has some potentially good uses, but I don’t think we as a society are coming at it the right way.
We’ve been very much encouraged to use AI at work – to make our work more efficient, not to replace us. Or so we’re told. I can see how AI can make some tasks faster (summarize notes, quickly draft up an email, etc.), but I also think we cannot blindly rely on what AI spits out (I’ve encountered too much false information in response to prompts. And when you tell AI that this is false information, it just goes “oops, my bad”. ) It’s a very slippery slope…. and I worry about the day when AI generated content is feeding AI?
Wow, San, that is so interesting that your work encourages you to use AI! I would be interested to know some of the specific things your organization recommends you lean on AI for — and whether you find that it does increase your efficiency.
Your point about accuracy is crucial and I think a lot of (too many) people either take whatever AI says/does as flawless, or are just unwilling to take the time and energy to improve it. That’s one of the things that concerns me about AI use in doctor offices, even with something as simple as AI visit summaries. I don’t think there’s a recording of the conversation between patient and doctor; I think the AI simply listens and summarizes. The physician should go back and read carefully through the summary to ensure it’s accurate, but what if she doesn’t have time, or has had good luck with AI being accurate in the past and expects it to always be accurate, and the AI mishears or misunderstands something important? I just feel like there’s too much room for error.
Ahh such a complex thing!! I definitely have been using it more in day to day life than even a few months ago. At work mostly just for things like summarizing notes etc. I intentionally do not use it for crafting emails because I don’t like idea of losing that skill! But for searching things, I’ll admit I LOVE it. For example, I’m in vacation right now. I love being able to stand on a street corner and google, say, “is there an indoor shortcut from the Bellagio to the Cosmopolitan?” and have the summary spit out EXACTLY what I want to know. Like, I am in a hurry and with a group of 6, I don’t want a bunch of search results to pop up that require me to open various travel blogs and scroll past all their ads and other misc to just find what I want. I just want a magic someone/something to flat out answer my question! Which is what the AI summary thing in Google does…. It has also been so helpful for providing general lists of like, “don’t miss” things etc for travel. Granted I’m using it for pretty low stakes stuff, so if it’s wrong, whatever. And I’ll admit I’ve used it for “advice” sometimes (I asked it about packing tips recently and it was crazily helpful 😬). I know it’s a weird thing though so I do have mixed feelings. But it’s hard to deny some of the benefits!!! Ugh, I don’t know the answer. I do worry a lot about the future generations and the impact on schoolwork and thinking etc, too.
“I just want a magic someone/something to flat out answer my question!” <<<— YES. I get that, 100%. And I do think asking it for practical advice could be incredibly useful! I once used ChatGPT to help me create a workable schedule, and it was quite helpful in narrowing down the most important things I want to achieve vs the things that can be pushed to later.
I like “low stakes.” That seems key. And then also… I worry that using such a resource-depleting tool for low stakes things is wasteful???? I just don’t know!!!!!
Interesting topic, as a researcher in computing, this is consuming more and more of my time and thought each day. Here is an brief piece I’ve been working through this week that you might enjoy. It strikes me that that some of the questions this researcher and group are asking resonate with yours. The social cartography that they have produced might help you evaluate elements of discourse about AI that you are encountering in your day-to-day.
(But beware it is dense, I’ll probably still be working through it for some time to come: https://vanessaandreotti.substack.com/p/ai-cheerleading-ai-abstention-and)
Of course — computing must be incredibly disrupted by AI! I would be very interested to know your thoughts.
Thank you for the link, and the warning! I will check it out.
Hi Suzanne, my comment was getting too long, so I wrote my reply into a post. I hope you don’t mind that I linked to your blog: https://leaningagainstwalls.com/2026/06/27/if-it-looks-like-a-duck/
I have only ever used AI to create images I would not have created myself and I wouldn’t have paid someone to do so. I have used these images on my blog (I think three or four images on my blog have been AI-generated) and I was playing around with it at work to see if it could automate some email processes for me (it could not without me having to do just as much work making sure it didn’t make mistakes). That’s all. Every time I use it, I just see a bathtub’s worth of water being destroyed.
I also am INCREDIBLY uncomfortable with LLMs using my prompts and writing without giving me any sort of compensation. I get so nervous when people ask Chat GPT for assistance with medical/mental health questions. You don’t know who will have access to those questions!
And my students – what do they do all day? They are NOT reading or writing. They can’t problem solve. It’s NOT GOOD.
But I also feel like a Luddite waving my pitchfork around. Am I going to get left behind if I don’t embrace a technology that is destroying the planet and human minds? I hate 2026.
“Every time I use it, I just see a bathtub’s worth of water being destroyed.” <<<— YES. Kae noted that she uses AI for low stakes things, and that’s pretty much how I use it too, but is the destruction of a bathtub’s worth of water WORTH IT for such low stakes things?! UGH.
And yes, I feel exactly like you, Luddite with a pitchfork. Was this how, like, animal power purists felt when the automobile showed up?
The impact on kids and their ability to think and solve problems scares the shit out of me, though.
I share your feelings, Suzanne. On one level, I’m using the maps function and I’m googling things and I’m using Spotify “made for you” playlists.
But also, I think that it is a HUGE detriment to our society. I have heard that there are good things to be had with regards to the medical community, and I can’t comment on that. But I do think that our brains are collectively atrophying. My husband and I were talking about how easy it is now to travel, with maps functions and what have you. When he travelled in his 20s, he had to figure out where things were in, say, Indonesia, with no idea of the language and just a paper map and a copy of the Lonely Planet. I do not want to go back to those days but also, I think that in those days we were sharper and more cognizant of our surroundings, as opposed to now when we are just following the google map prompt.
I purposefully ignore AI overviews, usually, but sometimes I do see them. I think it’s mentally lazy to use AI to make lists or plans, but I know some people love it. I mean, it’s not THAT hard to just google things and do a search.
My friend’s husband suggested to me that I use ChatGPT to write my novel. He thought that I could “tighten up” my writing, and lest you think that was a constructive criticism, he was not actually reading any of my writing. He made sure I knew that he does not waste his time on novels, he only reads non-fiction, from which he can LEARN. He uses ChatGPT so extensively for some of his hobbies that my husband and I refer to it as his “special friend.”
I listened to a podcast about using ChatGPT for sexual relations, like a Chat girlfriend/ boyfriend. I personally wondered how the logistics would work, but I guess it’s just like having phone sex, but with text. I suppose it’s like an old-school chat room. The thought is very abhorrent to me.
To answer your first question re: unexpected people reading my blog, yes. Basically everyone I know IRL reads my blog – friends and family – so I do keep that in mind and I don’t say anything on there that I wouldn’t say in person. But. I just found out that our financial advisor’s assistant has been reading my blog for YEARS. This is such a random thing and I’ve met the woman maybe twice in my life, which is more than I have read a lot of readers, but still. It feels…odd, I guess. Not bad! Because she enjoys it. But it was sort of strange to discover someone who knows me so tangentially who is a reader. I don’t know why that’s different from any random person on the internet who could be reading this but it IS.
Your friend’s husband sounds… well, he kind of sounds like a dystopian villain. (His special friend, LOL.)
The role of AI in writing makes me kind of sick. Like, on the one hand, it is an awe-inspiring technological achievement that an AI can write a story or a novel. But on the other hand, my god. I do not want to read something cobbled together from other people’s creative effort, with no emotion or experience behind it.
Regarding people you know/sort of know reading your blog: Yes! That is exactly the feeling! It’s not bad, just odd.
About the only use for AI that I think could be a positive is in the medical field. Other than that? It’s a complete waste of precious resources (fresh water anyone?)
As I am navigating this job search, I am coming across a TON of AI companies that are looking to hire. I am hesitant to even apply, because I feel sure there will be an AI bust similar to the dot.com bust sooner or later. And even if the company looking to hire isn’t an AI company, usually embedded somewhere in the job description is something about wanting the person to embrace AI to help them do their job. How could I apply knowing that I would actively resist using AI?
Oh Gigi, the job search must be RIFE with AI opportunities. I can imagine the ethical and emotional conflicts that must go alongside finding work that aligns with your own stance on AI. Yuck.
I am very concerned that AI will be mostly used with negative consequences for humanity. It’s true that most technologies have both good and bad uses. So far it seems to me that for AI the bad outweighs the good.
“They agreed that AI is so much cheaper and easier and more efficient than hiring an expert to do those tasks.” This is because, and I am going to shout at them, THE TRUE ECONOMIC COST IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE PRICE OF RUNNING AI. You essentially acknowledged this numerous times – the environmental costs are huge, and furthermore, the deterioration in quality of life near data centers will probably fall mostly on those who are already vulnerable.
I am looking to retire soon. My job will likely be done by AI as soon as I leave my tiny company.
I have a good friend who is an excellent graphic designer. Will AI ruin her job chances? One of my kids is an amateur artist. How will the prevalence of AI affect the art world?
“THE TRUE ECONOMIC COST IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE PRICE OF RUNNING AI.” <<<<—– YESSSSSSS. This 100%.
What a crazy time we live in, eh? I honestly do not even know what to think.
I suspect AI will be a net negative for society, but also can’t discount that it will be positive in some areas (the medical community is an obvious thought).
Gah. It’s all so confusing. I agree with Kae that it can be so helpful to get information immediately to a specific question. It’s also bizarre to think that a few decades ago, (before Google, phones, and data), we had to ask strangers for directions, study maps, and explore the world with a lot less information.
On the one hand, I think society was SO MUCH BETTER before this information age. On the other hand, it feels like the ship has sailed? So as a human living in society, it’s hard to know how to proceed.
I feel similarly about phone use. For years I didn’t have a cell phone or a texting plan. But it’s at the stage now where you basically HAVE to have a cell phone. You need a number for 2 factor authentication. You need a phone for boarding passes on planes. My kids have had entire sports things organized exclusively via an app—if I’m going to know where they’re playing or get updates about cancellations I both have to have a phone AND the specific app.
It is so hard to know how to proceed. Like you, I was a late adopter to texting and smart phone use. I wish I had persisted. My phone does bring me closer to people I love, which is good… and it is a crutch and a distraction and I hate it.
Every time I mention that my kid doesn’t yet have a phone, I feel like it comes across as judgy of those whose kids DO have a phone — and I do not judge, at all. There are LOTS of great reasons for giving a kid a phone, and I think a lot of kids handle them just fine. However, a phone would not be good for my specific kid, and so she doesn’t have one… and I feel strongly about her not having one. But it’s not a choice that feels 100% right! I know it makes her an outlier among her friends, and I know that feels awful, especially at her age. IT IS SO HARD TO KNOW HOW TO PROCEED.
AI is such a hot topic! It’s absolutely hated – I mean HATED – in the art world. It scours the internet for any art anyone has ever posted and steals it, then regurgitates it for whatever prompt a person has typed into the little search box. Then there’s a whole thing where artists get accused of using AI art when they haven’t. Generally, it’s artists accusing other artists, and it’s a serious witch hunt!
Here’s a funny thing – living on a ranch, AI has always meant Artificial Insemination to me! Whenever I see anyone talking about AI, it’s my first thought!
And now the rest of us will think of the OG AI every time someone says it, and we will either smirk or giggle. Michelle, you truly have made our world a better place!
Aww, thank you, Birchie! You made my day…and right back at you! ❤️
I feel much more plugged in to the writing world than to the art world, so I really appreciate this perspective. This is definitely going to make me think twice about using Canva to generate images.
Artificial Insemination!!!!! This is amazing. And it kind of feels accurate for Artificial Intelligence, too — we are being inseminated by artificial information. I wonder if thinking about AI in those terms will help me avoid it.
Suzanne, I actually think Canva is one of the more ethical places to generate images. They ask artist to opt in, and I think they may even compensate them. I’m not an expert, but that is my understanding.
Maybe no one was expecting the post to go in this direction, but what an interesting topic, so no one minds.
I don’t hate AI. I’ve found it very useful for fitness and nutrition things. For example, last winter when I hurt my rib and the pain lasted forever, I asked AI to give me a simple upper body workout that wouldn’t aggravate a rib injury. The only other way I could have gotten the info would have been to schedule an appointment with a physical therapist, which is not something that I’m going to do for a minor injury. I don’t use it a ton, but I use it enough that I created a log in and as I continue to ask questions, I can tell that it’s using what it has “learned” about me from previous sessions, so I’m not always reinventing the wheel.
I hate it for writing. Period end of sentence. Just because it “can” do something doesn’t mean that it should. The only time I’ve used it for that was for help in figuring out how to say things in work emails, and the voice was so fake that it was useless. I also don’t like having to physically talk to it. I tried a language learning app which was so creepy, and anytime I’ve gotten it for customer service it ended up transferring me to a real human. I would have loved it if I could have used it for work, but it didn’t seem to be up to any of the mind numbing manual tasks that I was swamped with.
While it’s true that people who don’t mind bad writing will use AI instead of hiring a real writer, folks who need the written word to make sense and to sound like it came from a human will continue to hire real people to write words, so there will continue to be a demand for the skill. Yes it’s going to replace some jobs, but other fields will open up for today’s elevator operators and video store clerks.
Yes, I have definitely used ChatGPT to help me come up with a workout routine.
“I hate it for writing. Period end of sentence. Just because it “can” do something doesn’t mean that it should.” YES. Same here, 100% agreement. Writing is precious and personal and taps into things I want to cultivate and preserve, like my ability to craft sentences I find to be beautiful, or emotions I want to recreate for myself and others. I want my writing to remain pure and unadulterated by AI.
I really hope you’re right about writing, Birchie. It feels like a) a lot of people don’t recognize or care about the difference between okay (or even bad) writing and good writing, and b) even if they do recognize the difference, they don’t care as long as the okay/bad writing is fast and free. I could definitely see a “new” field of editing opening up, where writers are asked to improve AI text… but that feels soul killing to me. I suppose we’ll just have to see what happens.
I hope that the fact that AI cannot actually think means there will be more jobs for English and Philosophy majors, but I’m not convinced. I worry about it taking my job, and not being able to find another, because I don’t know enough about it. Which means I should learn about it right? Which I do not want to do. UGH. I try to not use it, I like water, and here in California, water is precious. I know I need to have SOME idea of how to use it, so I sometimes use it for work, but I don’t do the complicated stuff that my husband does…he asks nuanced questions and gets more accurate information because of it. I feel like I should know how to do this, but at the same time, I get angry at him for doing it. UGH. So many UGHs.
SO MANY UGHS. You’ve articulated exactly the way my brain continues to churn round and round between acceptance/adoption and outright refusal to engage.
I write marketing copy, one of the fields you cite. The discussion about the writing being worse, but then shrugging that off was chilling. And my work is getting scarcer and scarcer. I want to keep working another 5 years or so, but that may not be realistic.
My older kid works as a video editor and my younger one wants to be a therapist, both fields that are endangered by AI and they have their whole careers ahead of them. It’s so much scarier for them (and the planet).
And yet… I do still use it for work sometimes and I use various apps for all sorts of things. It’s hard to resist/avoid.
I am so conflicted on the whole AI topic; I use it sparingly, but it feels inevitable that it’s soon going to be part of the fabric of our lives. I’m alarmed at how quickly it’s become ubiquitous.
I live in a small (5,000+ people) rural town in Michigan called Dowagiac. All the small towns around me are battling data centers, and mine is now one of them. The NYT even included us in an article about data centers! Most of us in town are solidly against the data center here, but we are fighting a losing battle. The company that owns it just hugely expanded the amount of land for the current center, and has plans for massive expansion.
I’m going to a couple of town meetings in July – one is a City Council meeting where Hyperscale Data will be present and hopefully addressing our concerns re: water and electric usage, noise, etc. The other is an open house being held by a law firm that has a class action lawsuit against the data center for noise nuisance.
I did not have this on my 2026 bingo card!
Seems like everyone has covered the negative aspects of AI (Okay, I’m very against using AI for illustrations. Some one create those illustrations — and now the illustrations are free for all and the illustrator is not getting paid. Please use copyright-free sites to get any illustrations you want…don’t steal them using AI.)
But I’m retired now from statistics, and it is SO FRUSTRATING to talk to a doctor, who has probably seen the statistics. But if a method worked on one of his patients, he will use that method on all of his patients with that specific problem. Even though a better solution works on 80% and his only works on 10%. So AI is not as human-centered. AI will tell you to use the other method.
I also went to a research talk one time on using AI for deciding whether a skin problem is likely cancerous or not. Ahh…. what a GREAT way to use AI. It was correct much more than human beings were.
I suspect there will be a lot of hype for a while, and then things will settle down and people will stop thinking of it as human. It is just a computer program looking at lots of data. We will need human people to run it, just like we needed automobile workers when cars came into existence and wagon makers lost their jobs.
This is really fascinating, Suzanne, and I don’t know how I missed it earlier. It’s a conversation I have with myself often — and like you, I’m on the fence in many ways. AI has its pros and cons, doesn’t it? I think I use it like you do — my photo programs, viewing recommendations, and interpretation. When I get an XRay or scan result in “medical speak,” it’s AI that puts it into plain English with an explanation for me.
But I also know that AI’s answers are only as good as the info it pulls them from — and they can be wrong. I worry about many of the same things you do — the disastrous effects on the environment for one, the job market and perhaps most important to me, the ability to think or do things creatively. I don’t want a program to write something for me. Let it help me research the subject and then creatively think about it and write about it myself. I don”t want it to create my art, I want to pick up the brush and do it myself. I want to learn, not merely implement. And I’m old enough to have thought that through. But what I worry about most is what it’s doing to kids who aren’t learning those critical thinking and creative skills.
I suppose like most things, it can be used for good or for ill. It’s just defining what “good”and “ill” are. Sorry. I’m rambling!AI would have edited this one down!
This is interesting and you’ve alerted me to many things AI does that I was unaware of. My biggest gripe with AI (from my personal experiences) is that people use AI to help them write – like people in my writing group, and that’s been challenging. We’ve included a clause that AI generated work isn’t allowed.
I’ve discovered that AI can answer a lot of my questions. For example when I was making the grad movie for Curly I asked AI how to do something, like add a scene menu, using AI. That was very helpful.
The other day I was thinking about Ella starting college in August and wondering how teachers and professors even police AI use. How is that possible?
I never really worried about it when Ella was in high school because she had a good handle on her assignments, and she is very anti-AI (love her). I, however, fall more on the side of using it when it makes sense.
I do have a friend who uses it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It helps her with almost everything she does.
I know there are environmental concerns around AI, but I also wonder how we stop something that feels this embedded already. It feels like we are up against a massive mountain. Part of me wonders if the bigger shift will happen if/when(?) AI becomes more heavily monetized and people become more selective about how they use it.
I hate AI. There. I said it. I know it is used in applications I used, like all the things in parenthesis, but that is happening behind the scenes and I am not intentionally going to an AI agent to get help with something, and it’s more so algorithm than truely AI in my opinion but there likely isn’t much difference between AI and algorithms. I have never in my life used ChatGPT. I am a total boomer about AI and I do not care if people judge me for it. I think it will make people more stupid and less able to critically think. And why are we so obsessed with efficiency as a nation. I think more friction is necessary in our world, not less. But AI-adoption will reduce friction and make people even worse at talking to other humans.
I am encouraged to use our internal AI at work. I ended up on the “naughty list” for not using it this spring. So now I use it a little bit to stay off that problem child list. But it annoys me. And every time I see this one senior leader, he is asking how we are using the AI tool and I was to explode and scream! There are very few applications in my role since I’m so client facing. I will use it to reformat an excel file with holdings and I’ve used it to compare two pdfs and asked it to summarize the differences for a system upgrade but that’s it. For awhile, AI was summarizing my text messages and IT DROVE ME INSANE.
So TLDR, I have a very “get the f off my yard” feeling about AI and I worry about what it means for our kids’ futures. Will they learn to drive a car (yes, I think so), will they go to college (yes, I hope so), but who even knows (these are debates that are had on bloomberg chats at work that make me so angry).
Lastly, have you read “Culpability”? It’s my August book club book that I am the leader for. I started it yesterday and it’s so good and is about AI!
ugh I hate AI for so many reasons, which have all been summed up by various other commenters so I won’t repeat those. I’ll instead add that my sister is a translator and her business entirely dried up in a shockingly short period of time because AI could do it well enough. It’s not as good as a human but it’s good enough for most people for most applications. So in her late 30’s she’s back in school retraining. Apparently when she was in translation school they talked about how translation would never been over by computers because you need a human to nuance the language and understand the complex meaning of writing. Unfortunately “free” ai translations that are mostly ok are enough for a lot of people.
My second AI story is that my FIL is visiting and he’s a big AI user and if I have to hear him converse with the AI gremlin in his phone to get random info like how much a ford transit van costs in Canada (he is not in the market for a ford transit van…) again I might scream. He has it set so this robotic voices talks back at him and I HATE it. He has a habit of doing it in the car so can’t really get away from it especially as I’m the driver.