The world overvalues AI at this point. It’s a delusion spawned out of a deep inability to understand the technology, and the exceptional ability of these systems to make people anthropomorphize their behavior, as well as fall victim to the mythologization of AI through the enormous amount of science fiction literature and movies.
The fault in thinking about AI systems comes from so many places.
First off, the tech CEOs are treated as experts, their words are spread in podcasts, by influencers, by financial analysts and uncritical journalists. They’re salespeople, they’re working with what they do, precisely because they’re good at communicating in front of a crowd. But the public treats these people as the computer scientist experts they are not. And they get swept up in sale-pitch narratives that blend fictional ideas about AI with promises they never have to fulfill, driving hype.
Second, these systems are meant to simulate intelligence, and so people believe they are intelligent. But it is only that, belief. Like when people who are good at manipulating, they can spawn a following in politics, as a cult, as an ideology, as a movement. We have systems built to perpetuate the illusion of thinking, and they’re never getting tired of producing that illusion. The relentlessness of a computer system operating on always upholding the illusion makes for a powerful simulacra that slowly erodes people’s skepticism until they believe the illusion. But there are still no proof they are actually intelligent, quite the opposite.
Third, people don’t understand the technology, not even the computer scientists themselves. This has to do with the limitations in expertise. While the public don’t understand the actual technology itself, the computer scientists don’t understand philosophy and psychology. The public’s only source of reference for AI is from science fiction, and so they willingly or unwillingly filter everything they hear and everything they experience through that lens. It’s either doom or evolution, no one seems to look at the tech itself and understand it for what it is. Couple that with the constant myth-building spawned by the tech companies over-promising through their teeth and you have a public whose entire narrative around AI is so fictionalized that they live in total delusion. A delusion the computer scientists themselves aren’t immune to, as they, noses down into code and cold material silicone aren’t equipped to analyze their own reaction to when the system simulates human behavior. That’s why we get delusional coders who think they’ve met a machine god.
Fourth, people are generally bad at critical thinking, and extremely prone to following patterns if they aren’t aware of their own thinking, biases and fallacies. Why are so many just accepting the answers they get from these systems? Because they do the same with everything else around them. Massive amount of people adopts and follow political figures with destructive policies and ideas. Because they’re swept up in narratives that give them comfort. People do not operate on self-sufficient critical thinking, they follow what others decide for them, always, every minute of the day. Everything from how they vote, think about problems in the world, what they buy, what opinions they have, what they like and don’t like can be manipulated easily. And when a system is an expert at communicating, people have found their ultimate father or mother-figure who can guide them in life. People offload the heavy lifting of thinking and decisions to the AI-models, not because it is convenient, but because they’re biologically set out to do so. Only very few in society reject this surrender to the other, regardless of what that other is. Most people surrender to others’ will, including the AI-systems. This is why they end up being middle-men between someone and an AI system, rather than being assisted by the system. And even if they think they’re assisted, more often than not, they are fooled by the process to think so, because they do not understand cognitive biases and fallacies’ roles in their thought process. People generally do not think for themselves.
Fifth, most people do not understand the difference between the creative process and the result. Without going too far into the concept of art, this is broader than that. The act of craft and doing something, even writing this post, is a malleable and ever-changing part of myself. I am constantly evolving in thought, knowledge and wisdom by doing it, and the accumulation of hours doing it is an existence in itself. The result, for me, is not just the goal, it is the effect of doing it that counts equally or more. Offloading it to a system, just to reach a result fast, means offloading the more important part of participating in forming that result. It gives a hollow result, void of an actual meaning to me and others.
It’s this fifth part that is important to the guidelines. If I were to say that this entire post had been written by an AI, what do you feel? And if I then tell you that no, it was not written by an AI, and that I spent more than an hour to compose this, check the language and format, checking the intended message, put effort into figuring out if I missed something, if I wrote too much, if I actually explained what I wanted to explain, what did the text gain from it?
And it is this value in the human element that is important. The end result that can be skipped to by offloading thinking and craft to an AI system will always be void of meaning, regardless of how interesting its output is. An AI can produce a novelty, a fascinating output of technology, of a physical system.
The tech itself is really fascinating and interesting, but the notion it can replace the humanity behind these words is an illusion, driven by a deep misunderstanding of the technology, a mythologization of the concept of AI and desire to be governed by a higher power.
All of this essentially obscures the reality of AI. That the systems have a limited use-case, powerful in what they can do, but not in the fictionalized way that media portray, or tech CEOs promise (which in itself is spawned by their deep misunderstanding of the fiction they reference).
AI is a mirror to ourselves. It shows the deep flaws in human thinking, both in their own processes, and how we relate to their function and outputs.
There is an existential nihilism to offloading our humanity to these systems, a self-destructive tendency to replace our worth in favor of convenient death.
To replace your own efforts in thought and craft, in communication and relation to other people by the use of these systems is to sign off on your own irrelevancy as a human, because these tools can delude people to surrender more than the hand that wields the hammer, if people aren’t aware of how they wield the systems.
That’s why it is deeply important to recognize the tool’s function for what it is, and not as fiction or myth, regardless of how many delusions spawn such narratives. To understand what fire is used for, it’s actual use, benefit and function, and that it is not used to cleanse the soul or heal others around you.
People cannot seem to stop the nihilist path to irrelevancy… this forum is a place that rejects that path. Which means, a rejection of the people who perpetuate the narrative of becoming irrelevant, to reject the notion of unavoidable meaninglessness brought on by these algorithmic systems.
