Here is your perfect prescription for poor writing and analytics: let “artificial intelligence” do your work for you. I’ve learned this from real experience.
For a while, I enjoyed letting AI take a look at my content prior to publication. It seemed valuable for facts and feedback.
Plus I enjoyed all the personal flattery it gave me, I admit. The engine was always complimentary.
When I would catch AI in an error, the engine would apologize. That made me feel smart. So I had this seeming friend who clearly liked me and was humble enough to defer to my expertise.
I’m not sure if it is getting worse or if I’m onto the racket but I’m no longer impressed. For simple math or historical dates or sequencing news events, it can be a thing of value, though it is always a good idea to double-check. It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler.
More recently, I’ve been asking how my content could be improved. The results are revealing. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade.
The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English.
Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.
People who spend hours arguing on AI often believe that they are making a contribution, training the engine to be better. It’s simply not true. The reverse is the case. AI is training you to think more like it thinks, which is not at all.
Considering why and how AI initially intrigued me, I’m realizing that its superpower is not its astonishing recall and capacity to generate answers and prose in any context instantly. No, its true power is something else, something inauspicious and thereby more insidious. Its draw is that AI takes you seriously, flatters your intelligence, validates your sense of things, and affirms your dignity.
Hellbound and Down 