Are you concerned about the use of artificial intelligence?
I recently watched a clip of a bar chart being explained by an Australian academic who I follow on social media. I’ve seen him present before at an online conference. He occasionally does stand up comedy so often includes a joke when presenting and didn’t disappoint as he explained the bar chart on the screen.
But guess what? – it wasn’t him ! He had prompted AI to clone his voice, explain the bar chart and include a joke!
Read on for some thoughts on AI.
Have a good month!
Sinead
Joseph Fasano is an American writer and educator. He studied mathematics and astrophysics at Harvard University before switching to philosophy and language. He is well known for his poetry as well as other writing endeavours.
He recently offered the following poem as feedback to a student who had used AI to complete coursework.
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Now I send it back
Into your own hands.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying to be free of?
The living? The miraculous task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
I saw this on social media and the discussion that followed raised some important questions (I paraphrase) – For what purpose are we trying to rush through our work? To make it easier? What are we going to do with the brain cells we haven’t used? Surely there’s satisfaction and joy in completing the work ourselves?
Oliver Burkeman in his The Imperfectionist May 2024 newsletter entitled “it’s the human connection, stupid”, argues that we don’t need to worry about AI taking over our jobs.
His view is that creativity and connection are about human to human interaction and that replacing one human with artificial intelligence will not give the remaining human the same feeling or experience.
He hopes there will always be a market for human connection and that “simulated novelists, pretend therapy and fake musicians” will never replace real people.
He’s not anti-AI and sees its use as a tool to make some of our routine tasks easier (he gives the example of transcribing spoken word to written text). However, he wants to remain like a thinking human, thinking like a human and not a human who thinks in AI prompts.
What he enjoys about his writing is the effort to do it and what he thinks readers enjoy is connecting with the effort that the writer put in to create the article, story or chapter.
I’ll end this with a quote from Oliver, “If I could press a button that generated a book chapter or a newsletter like this, so that nobody could tell the difference, I’d have eliminated all the effort involved – and also the entire point of doing it in the first place.”
| “Creativity is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought” Albert Einstein “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.” Ted Chiang in The New Yorker 31 August 2024 “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” paraphrasing the work of Emily M Bender (thank you B for highlighting the article to me) “The joy of creating something from nothing will never go away. AI will simply become part of the creation process just like spell check and the calculator did.” Ross Simmonds |
Sinead Huskisson 