Of course, marvels from MRIs to personal computers have certainly enhanced our lives. But too often technology, now supercharged with AI, also seduces us with convenience while sowing doubt about perception itself. Any reporting our president doesn’t like is “fake news.” Conspiracy theories fill social media. People have virtual relationships. Hackers steal identities. Citizens’ faith in our institutions is waning.
Not to mention how AI is used to enhance governments’ surveillance of citizens and the huge amounts of electricity and water it demands.
Get The Gavel
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.
The AI genie may be out of the bottle but it needs the firm hand of regulation. Alas, the public outcry and the political will that are necessary have yet to coalesce.
John Swan
Natick
While I agree that kids need education on the dangers of AI across the board, in this case that alone isn’t enough (“Schools lag on fighting deepfake porn”). They also need education on the dangers of toxic masculinity, whether it involves AI or not.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by raggedglory
To answer the question posed in the headline “If a chatbot wrote this, would you read it?”: No, I would not.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by Johnny Allston
Zoe Yu’s April 12 Ideas essay, “AI is destroying good writing,” ignores the reality that artificial intelligence can be a valuable tool. Much like a dictionary, thesaurus, writing group, or human editor, AI can help writers improve their work. Yu labels the tool’s results as “flat,” “recognizable,” “terrible,” and “slop.” Such dismissiveness is reminiscent of the anti-progress Luddites.
I’m looking forward to the day when writers are praised, rather than chastised, for their willingness to add another tool to their craft arsenals.
Joan Axelrod-Contrada
Northampton
The writer is an author and journalist.
There is human connection in reading ideas that the author has curated while writing, revising, clarifying, rewriting, editing, and publishing. A machine can’t achieve a result equal to that thought process. I fear that readers, if they let themselves become accustomed to continuous AI slop, might come to forget what they are missing.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by BecknBuv
I agree, BecknBuv. What I also fear is the loss of organizing, analyzing, and critical thinking skills that develop as people write. The struggle to write coherently — whether by professional writers or laypeople — is one of the important ways humans develop their mental capacities. Think of what the mind goes through to write a high school essay, a college essay, or just an ordinary good letter.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by LEAP4Ed
Remember the late 1970s when kids were discouraged from using newly marketed small calculators in math class? AI is about to bring the most radical evolution in human consciousness in recorded history.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by FloresdelaHoz
I’m glad I won’t live long enough to see that world.
Posted on bostonglobe.com by lzmcl527
The imperative to preserve the human thought process
We should indeed do as Anna Kusmer suggests in her April 10 op-ed, “I write to find out what I think”: Avoid artificial intelligence and write ourselves, in order to better understand what we ourselves think.
An even greater reason to learn and practice writing is that it helps us learn to think in the first place. Substituting large language models’ suggestions in place of teasing out our own words avoids an important exercise in formulating our thoughts.
LLMs work because they’ve “seen” the words representing thoughts of billions of other people — and, yes, of other LLMs as well. Some may argue that the words of “others” are all we need to perform our everyday tasks. As a practical matter this may be true. But it runs the risk of creating a society of unthinking individuals. What could go wrong?
Stephen Polit
Belmont
My last engineering project before retiring was helping a team at Massachusetts General Hospital develop a ventilator for use during the first COVID-19 wave. My role essentially was to write a quality and safety assurance document that substantiated the work of the hastily formed team and its claims that it was achieving its desired purpose.
I wrote what people said on Zoom calls and reflected it back to them. Anything that I wrote in the document had to make engineering sense to me and be accepted by everyone else on their terms, where “everyone else” included engineers from device manufacturers and the regulatory world, physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, technicians, and others.
Because of how quickly different circumstances developed during that time, the document was never completed, but at its root was the explicit, detailed telling of a story of the combined, shared, and urgent intent of people with differently informed professional perspectives on caregiving to save lives.
I am at work now on a short article on a topic that has long interested me: our ability to keep up with the accelerating rate of change of modern technology. From that perspective, artificial intelligence interests me greatly. But not as much as it concerns me. I thought Anna Kusmer’s “I write to find out what I think” nailed the subject.
I don’t care how smart AI is — it will never bring to a project what teams like the one I was privileged to serve brought. I’ve never seen my perspective on writing so succinctly illuminated as it is in the Joan Didion line that Kusmer cites: “I write to find out what I am thinking.” Kusmer’s essay occupies a space on our refrigerator.
Rick Schrenker
North Reading