Artificial intelligence is the buzzword of the moment. While we barely spoke of it five years ago, some now fear it’s on the verge of taking over our world. And yes, there are headlines that feed those fears—self-driving Teslas crashing into driveways, a young woman dating a chatbot boyfriend created through ChatGPT. It’s unsettling.
But if we think about AI as simply the newest form of technology, then history is simply repeating itself. Parents were convinced the introduction of the television into homes would destroy their children’s brains forever, turning them into mindless zombies. When computers became mainstream, access to the internet and frequent use of email became the concern d’jour. CNN wrote an article in 2005 claiming emails would damage our IQs “more than pot” (https://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/). Each of these innovations caused panic—and each eventually found a place in our lives. They didn’t destroy us, though they certainly changed the way we live.
Personally, I enjoy turning on my television and sending a quick email, and I’m not convinced either have made me less intelligent. Just last night I watched a hockey game with my family which was being played hundreds of miles away, and then we all watched the news at 11:00pm in order to track the storms in our area and to see if we were at risk for a tornado. This morning I communicated with someone through 6 different email messages, something that would have taken weeks via snail mail.
So here we are with AI—somewhere between excitement and unease. Don’t you think Henry Ford felt the same way when he sent his first Model T out on the roads?
Here’s my personal take on AI: it’s okay (even wonderful) if used as the equivalent of a calculator. But calculators are best used after you’ve learned how to do the math. They’re tools—efficient and useful—but not substitutes for understanding. The same should go for AI.
AI lives in a world of gray. All of us in the creative industry worry about how and when AI will produce creative projects that are our livelihood. Spines, a new company which promises to streamline the process for authors using AI to edit, format, design and distribute, is being met with much scrutiny. Writers and publishers are understandably skeptical, worried about quality, ethics, and the future of human-made stories. (Here’s a recent article that’s worth reading.)
And yet—true confession—I use AI as an author. Wait! Don’t sound the alarms. I use it as a tool, like that calculator I mentioned earlier. Let me explain.
Back in March, I went on a writing retreat, hoping to create a series of short stories based on a family who lives in a funeral home. I only had three days, and I wanted to crank out as much first-draft material as possible, so I made sure to do some brainstorming and outlining before I left. I knew I would need a number of names of old people who had died and were at the funeral home; I also knew that stopping to google while I wrote would be a recipe for disaster. Every good writer knows they are looking for a distraction, and too often we find ourselves falling down the rabbit hole of meaningless internet scrolling, all in the name of “research.” Knowing this danger that would possibly await me, I went to Chat GPT and asked it to give me a dozen “names traditionally associated with old people.” It spit out Harold and Hazel and Gladys and Eleanor and George and Henry and Frank and Francis among others. Boom. Done. During my writing time, when I needed to add in a new name of a deceased person, I went directly to my list, chose a name and continued typing. No time wasted.
After writing my stories, I had a fellow author friend inform me of another clever option from Chat GPT. I entered one of my short stories and asked it to find any plot errors or loopholes in my writing. To my surprise, it offered the perspective of a critical reader, informing me that I had written about someone breaking into the funeral home, but I did not write if there was a keypad or a traditional key and lock on the door. How would the individual break in? Did they find out the code? Did they have a copy of the key? Brilliance. Thanks to AI, I had feedback but still needed to do the revision work on my own.
AI is a slippery slope. We discussed at our family dinner table how AI is a great tool which gets abused in the hands of unethical or lazy people. But that’s true of many other things.
So here’s my final thought: let’s welcome AI, but cautiously. It’s just the new technology kid on the block. It will cause concern from those who fear it will take over the world, just as cars and radio and television and computers and the internet. And traditionalists will forever fight anything that is new and different in our world (I think they’re still solely sending out snail mail). But let’s use the most powerful tool we have–our brains–to critically examine it, to predict issues we might be facing, to avoid using it in place of our own creative work, and above all to hold ourselves to an ethical standard in which we only use it for the good and never for evil. And let’s keep doing the real work of creating, revising, and imagining ourselves.