Deny AI: You Do Not Need To Get On Board

Over Christmas, I was having lunch with my godfather and my dad. Because both are businessmen, naturally they started talking about how each of their careers were going (which I can only involve myself with for a maximum of five minutes before boredom takes over). However, my godfather quickly got onto how AI has helped him get three months of work done in less than a day’s work, and how my dad should utilise this ASAP.

I am, and have always been, an open hater of AI. Naturally, my godfather was made aware of this, to which he responded that I needed to ‘get on board’. After some consideration, I concluded that although I may not be the most business savvy twenty-year-old around, I do not need to get on board in any way shape or form, and neither do you.

There are plenty of reasons we all already know. The amount of water and energy data centres require to run, the number of mistakes AI makes, and the fact that Chat GPT’s carbon footprint was equivalent to New York City’s last year.

These are all important points showing the problems with AI. But these general and widespread concerns seem to be doing little in slowing it down. To come at it from a new angle, my concern is centred around the philosophy of AI removing our need to critically think (which will be the position I beef my godfather from at a later date).

It will be no surprise that in my Philosophy degree, use of any AI is severely limited. But why is this no surprise? It’s because the purpose of my degree is to analyse how people should live, argue and choose through a critical lens. But this is not restricted to philosophy students alone. In Maths, proofs require critical analysis when getting into the nitty gritty of why x = y. In English Lit, you’re required to reason for why your opinion stands better than those of the scholars before you.

Using AI therefore obliterates the point of our degrees: the skill that is critical thinking. By getting a robot to form an opinion instead of you, you miss that key step. This step is not about the difference between getting a 2:1 instead of a 2:2, but that you are limiting the development of the frontmost part of your brain (the pre-frontal cortex), and therefore, limiting the possibilities on what kind of person you could be.

Going back to my lunch, when I was considering if I really should jump on the bandwagon (obviously very briefly, a girl has her moments), I thought about my godfather getting three months of work done in a day. This is not normal.

Not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist here but being able to reduce such an amount of work to a few hours draws parallels to those seen in Armageddon-Esque, SciFi movies. Let’s say three months of work in a few hours becomes the new standard. This means small businesses will likely fall behind, as three months of work is not as clearly structured or foreseeable for an independent café as it would be for Amazon. Furthermore, actual employees won’t be able to keep up, because the people that were previously necessary to carry out this amount of work are being outdone by some database in Ohio. AI doesn’t care about if you’re struggling, if that job was your only source of income to help your family out, or if that was the only job you were able to get full stop. To me, it seems like a business with AI is a business without emotion, and that is a scary thing.

The point of this is not to fear monger, but to raise awareness on the problems of human ambition. Why do we need to strive so far that we get rid of our other human characteristics, like empathy? Why is 3 months reduced to 3 hours automatically seen as a good thing? Do we always need to look for the easy way out? These questions make me think of ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’. Though this may be fiction, it seems all too relevant that in 2015 Marvel released a movie about developing an AI that becomes so strong, developing feeling, that it seeks to destroy the human race. Moving from fiction to reality, the recent scandal involving Grok and deepfake images of naked women could be a small taste now of what can happen when technology starts to get out of our control.

Now, I’m not saying you need to ban AI everywhere you go and stop asking ChatGPT to give you brief summaries on small topics within you modules. I’m not an intense anti-AI martyr, and University isn’t easy. All I’m saying is that we should think about the next time we prepare for our seminars, instead of using AI the night before, read a day or two in advance. When searching something up, just scroll once or twice down from your google search and click on an actual website. It may feel like a bit of a chore now, but I reckon your brain, your lecturers, and the turtles (VSCO girl reference) will thank you.

Words by Mieke de Groot, she/her