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.
