Are you dazzled by artificial intelligence (AI) tools that promise to make your life easier, save you time, or make up for lack of inspiration? You can avoid applying your own resources of time or mental energy to produce an article, attention-grabbing image, or business plan. But what do you forfeit?
“Just a tool” is a great way to look at a skill you can both acquire and keep intrinsically for the rest of your life. With AI, by contrast, you may be just a tool with a pretty short lifespan.
Loss of creativity
God made human beings with the innate ability to create. You can spend many hours working at something until it’s beautiful, poetic, and completely unlike anything that existed before. Will it take effort? Yes. Will it require brain energy? Absolutely. But it has something that AI doesn’t: heart.
It’s not possible for something inhuman to be creative because God-given creative power is simply not there. The Creator of the universe is not in it. Moreover, AI can’t replicate the nuances of human touch. From a spectator’s perspective, your creation may have flaws. However, unlike AI, those “imperfections” contain genuine intention and emotion because they are infused with the complex thoughts and musings of a real person. What some call flaws are unquantifiable virtue. It’s a mistake to let go of uniquely human and nearly limitless ability by handing it over to something without a soul.
It’s been said that art is the highest form of human expression. When someone can take their efforts and energy beyond duties, tasks, and requirements to a place of true creativity, something profound occurs. Not only is something new with its own unique voice birthed, but something new is also unlocked within the creator. They have mapped new pathways in their mind, clarified confusing concepts, and organized once disparate thoughts into an articulated mosaic.
Bypassing the creative process by feeding the task into a software program does not achieve similar results. In fact, researchers at MIT found that users of a prominent AI application have significantly lower brain activity, including weakened memory. As with your body’s muscles, every time you opt for a tech shortcut instead of applying your faculties, you’re quenching your creative potential.
Intellectual theft
The source material that “trains” AI must come from somewhere. Since it cannot put forth original thought, it must harvest or be fed from already created works that someone poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. Despite what some voices say, this boils down to robbing thinkers and creators of their rightful reward for their efforts—not to mention it’s copyright infringement. Massive numbers of authors and artists have already objected to the use of their works in the AI training process. However, even if the AI developers possess the rights they suppose they do, there is insufficient opportunity for creators to formally withdraw consent to participate in these “learning” operations.
Data harvesting is so ubiquitous that people are desensitized to it. They go to sleep while knowing in the back of their mind they’ve sold their privacy six ways from Sunday. Thus, what AI is doing doesn’t register. To some degree, they may view their existence as insignificant, so they don’t fight to keep their identity precious. They gladly trade their privacy for a momentary convenience.
To an already stretched-thin worker, cutting corners may seem appealing or even necessary. However, using a “tool” today and losing your job tomorrow is comparable to accruing a debt so large that your children will have to bear it. Or think of it this way: It will take five hours to fill the potholes in the road you only spent five minutes paving.
Furthermore, saving time by using AI is futile for most employees because, even when they save time, only the business owners see a change in their bottom line. And those owners are just deflecting the financial consequences onto their peers.
Devaluing quality
One of the great travesties of modern convenience or technological advancement in any domain, intended or not, is reducing craftsmanship to a commodity. Commoditization takes something that was once a carefully crafted product or service, strips it down to its most basic components, and renders something resembling the original through a repeatable, lower cost process. The goal is usually new profits from a wider market.
That’s also why some entrepreneurs are painted as saints for “democratization.” This term has become a favorite in the last couple of decades because it implies that a product or service has become more accessible to the average Joe, and that’s exactly how AI technology has been marketed. However, free access to created works is not a right. In fact, the opposite is true. All created works are protected by copyright law by default, which gives creators the authority to decide if and how their work can be used.
But what happened to appreciation for craftsmanship? Things created with excellence through intensive effort and skill have a cost. You could blame persistent inflation, or the loss of purchasing power, which has forced many people into a corner financially. Even digital media culture pressures users to constantly deliver content and show results or else sink forever into the forgotten abyss. As a result, they bypass a professional for something “free” so they can check the box for the day’s demands at no discernible cost to themselves. Instead of living by “anything worth doing is worth doing right,” the daily motto has become “everything must be done yesterday.”
Each use of AI is not only taking away a job for a creator, but it’s also removing one more stone in the bridge underneath entire industries. And not because a machine can do it better, but because many people believe that computer-generated results are good enough. Every time a computer takes a job (or a hundred jobs) away, the world’s workforce opportunities become smaller and more debased.
Homogenization of information
The program models that power AI are based on formulas, which are obvious to the trained eye. As a result, your output will likely be very similar to someone else’s. Consider the fact that everyone is trying to generate content to post on the same hot topics and appear knowledgeable or relevant. But when you have a hundred other articles that were all generated using the same formula, there really is no new thought out there. When someone wants to research that topic later, all the sources will end up saying essentially the same thing and citing each other in the process.
Remember, when all the content on a subject is generated by the same source or couple of sources, the information suffers from a limited range of perspectives. Ultimately, the information that people will be consuming in the future is going to be a primitive, oversimplified summary. The pool of available information will become so incestuous that, not only will the modern research process be pointless, but entire cultures will be incapable of using their brains.
Goodbye free thinking
When does centralization become a threat? When it dictates and supersedes human rights. Everyone has a right to the truth, yet that right has always been in jeopardy. If most of a society’s information can be traced back to one or two sources, there is cause for major alarm. Whoever controls that source is liable to mold it to fit their agenda. Even the most respected people in the world can never be trusted to oversee civilization’s collective knowledge of history, literature, or science. But that’s exactly what is at stake when you feed the AI beast.
Additionally, when everyone is using AI to generate their material, it reduces the world’s accessible content to meaningless regurgitated rhetoric. In other words, no one is saying anything truly unique. Hope in the fields of communication, design, journalism, art, etc., would be left to the few capable creators who remain honest and the slim chance their content would be noticed and valued. It would take a major reformation to restore to the world the appreciation of free thought.
Catalysts for poor choices
“The inevitability of” is a fatalistic mantra that lulls and coerces people into acceptance rather than resistance. Some would argue AI is used in so many everyday things you can’t avoid it. “It makes your life better, so just accept it!” This kind of peer pressure is the lowest argument for adoption of any concept.
The sister lie to “fear of missing out” is “If I don’t get on board now, I’ll fall behind the competition.” Another form of peer pressure, this pattern of thinking facilitates a dangerous group-think that accelerates the spread of an activity that should be avoided altogether. The ship may have left the shore, but it’s not too late to abandon it.
As relentless innovation has yielded higher quantities of goods or made a service more readily available, industries have made compromises at every turn. You can hear it every day when a senior adult reminisces about a household tool they’ve kept for forty years because “they don’t make them like they used to.” You can see it in the food industry when the invention of the microwave oven shifted American households to highly processed and nutrient-deficient meals of convenience.
Humans must not allow their lives to become so saturated with convenience measures that there is no meaning to what they do. Entire generations suffered from stunted social skills because digital media took the place of real human interaction. AI tools further condition people to accept an existence that is woefully beneath what they are capable of and created for. Truth and substance must not be held hostage by a soulless “intelligence.”
Choose real over artificial.
A Terrain of Loss: The Case against AI
Are you dazzled by artificial intelligence (AI) tools that promise to make your life easier, save you time, or make up for lack of inspiration? You can avoid applying your own resources of time or mental energy to produce an article, attention-grabbing image, or business plan. But what do you forfeit?
“Just a tool” is a great way to look at a skill you can both acquire and keep intrinsically for the rest of your life. With AI, by contrast, you may be just a tool with a pretty short lifespan.
Loss of creativity
God made human beings with the innate ability to create. You can spend many hours working at something until it’s beautiful, poetic, and completely unlike anything that existed before. Will it take effort? Yes. Will it require brain energy? Absolutely. But it has something that AI doesn’t: heart.
It’s not possible for something inhuman to be creative because God-given creative power is simply not there. The Creator of the universe is not in it. Moreover, AI can’t replicate the nuances of human touch. From a spectator’s perspective, your creation may have flaws. However, unlike AI, those “imperfections” contain genuine intention and emotion because they are infused with the complex thoughts and musings of a real person. What some call flaws are unquantifiable virtue. It’s a mistake to let go of uniquely human and nearly limitless ability by handing it over to something without a soul.
It’s been said that art is the highest form of human expression. When someone can take their efforts and energy beyond duties, tasks, and requirements to a place of true creativity, something profound occurs. Not only is something new with its own unique voice birthed, but something new is also unlocked within the creator. They have mapped new pathways in their mind, clarified confusing concepts, and organized once disparate thoughts into an articulated mosaic.
Bypassing the creative process by feeding the task into a software program does not achieve similar results. In fact, researchers at MIT found that users of a prominent AI application have significantly lower brain activity, including weakened memory. As with your body’s muscles, every time you opt for a tech shortcut instead of applying your faculties, you’re quenching your creative potential.
Intellectual theft
The source material that “trains” AI must come from somewhere. Since it cannot put forth original thought, it must harvest or be fed from already created works that someone poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. Despite what some voices say, this boils down to robbing thinkers and creators of their rightful reward for their efforts—not to mention it’s copyright infringement. Massive numbers of authors and artists have already objected to the use of their works in the AI training process. However, even if the AI developers possess the rights they suppose they do, there is insufficient opportunity for creators to formally withdraw consent to participate in these “learning” operations.
Data harvesting is so ubiquitous that people are desensitized to it. They go to sleep while knowing in the back of their mind they’ve sold their privacy six ways from Sunday. Thus, what AI is doing doesn’t register. To some degree, they may view their existence as insignificant, so they don’t fight to keep their identity precious. They gladly trade their privacy for a momentary convenience.
To an already stretched-thin worker, cutting corners may seem appealing or even necessary. However, using a “tool” today and losing your job tomorrow is comparable to accruing a debt so large that your children will have to bear it. Or think of it this way: It will take five hours to fill the potholes in the road you only spent five minutes paving.
Furthermore, saving time by using AI is futile for most employees because, even when they save time, only the business owners see a change in their bottom line. And those owners are just deflecting the financial consequences onto their peers.
Devaluing quality
One of the great travesties of modern convenience or technological advancement in any domain, intended or not, is reducing craftsmanship to a commodity. Commoditization takes something that was once a carefully crafted product or service, strips it down to its most basic components, and renders something resembling the original through a repeatable, lower cost process. The goal is usually new profits from a wider market.
That’s also why some entrepreneurs are painted as saints for “democratization.” This term has become a favorite in the last couple of decades because it implies that a product or service has become more accessible to the average Joe, and that’s exactly how AI technology has been marketed. However, free access to created works is not a right. In fact, the opposite is true. All created works are protected by copyright law by default, which gives creators the authority to decide if and how their work can be used.
But what happened to appreciation for craftsmanship? Things created with excellence through intensive effort and skill have a cost. You could blame persistent inflation, or the loss of purchasing power, which has forced many people into a corner financially. Even digital media culture pressures users to constantly deliver content and show results or else sink forever into the forgotten abyss. As a result, they bypass a professional for something “free” so they can check the box for the day’s demands at no discernible cost to themselves. Instead of living by “anything worth doing is worth doing right,” the daily motto has become “everything must be done yesterday.”
Each use of AI is not only taking away a job for a creator, but it’s also removing one more stone in the bridge underneath entire industries. And not because a machine can do it better, but because many people believe that computer-generated results are good enough. Every time a computer takes a job (or a hundred jobs) away, the world’s workforce opportunities become smaller and more debased.
Homogenization of information
The program models that power AI are based on formulas, which are obvious to the trained eye. As a result, your output will likely be very similar to someone else’s. Consider the fact that everyone is trying to generate content to post on the same hot topics and appear knowledgeable or relevant. But when you have a hundred other articles that were all generated using the same formula, there really is no new thought out there. When someone wants to research that topic later, all the sources will end up saying essentially the same thing and citing each other in the process.
Remember, when all the content on a subject is generated by the same source or couple of sources, the information suffers from a limited range of perspectives. Ultimately, the information that people will be consuming in the future is going to be a primitive, oversimplified summary. The pool of available information will become so incestuous that, not only will the modern research process be pointless, but entire cultures will be incapable of using their brains.
Goodbye free thinking
When does centralization become a threat? When it dictates and supersedes human rights. Everyone has a right to the truth, yet that right has always been in jeopardy. If most of a society’s information can be traced back to one or two sources, there is cause for major alarm. Whoever controls that source is liable to mold it to fit their agenda. Even the most respected people in the world can never be trusted to oversee civilization’s collective knowledge of history, literature, or science. But that’s exactly what is at stake when you feed the AI beast.
Additionally, when everyone is using AI to generate their material, it reduces the world’s accessible content to meaningless regurgitated rhetoric. In other words, no one is saying anything truly unique. Hope in the fields of communication, design, journalism, art, etc., would be left to the few capable creators who remain honest and the slim chance their content would be noticed and valued. It would take a major reformation to restore to the world the appreciation of free thought.
Catalysts for poor choices
“The inevitability of” is a fatalistic mantra that lulls and coerces people into acceptance rather than resistance. Some would argue AI is used in so many everyday things you can’t avoid it. “It makes your life better, so just accept it!” This kind of peer pressure is the lowest argument for adoption of any concept.
The sister lie to “fear of missing out” is “If I don’t get on board now, I’ll fall behind the competition.” Another form of peer pressure, this pattern of thinking facilitates a dangerous group-think that accelerates the spread of an activity that should be avoided altogether. The ship may have left the shore, but it’s not too late to abandon it.
As relentless innovation has yielded higher quantities of goods or made a service more readily available, industries have made compromises at every turn. You can hear it every day when a senior adult reminisces about a household tool they’ve kept for forty years because “they don’t make them like they used to.” You can see it in the food industry when the invention of the microwave oven shifted American households to highly processed and nutrient-deficient meals of convenience.
Humans must not allow their lives to become so saturated with convenience measures that there is no meaning to what they do. Entire generations suffered from stunted social skills because digital media took the place of real human interaction. AI tools further condition people to accept an existence that is woefully beneath what they are capable of and created for. Truth and substance must not be held hostage by a soulless “intelligence.”
Choose real over artificial.