Is AI Boon or Ban?

AI is achieving significant milestones in various sectors, including strategic analysis and complex reasoning. Experts predict that AI will soon excel in most complex thinking tasks, but several obstacles threaten the development of more advanced AI.

Public suspicion towards AI has grown significantly, exacerbated by events like the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal and the spread of deep fakes during elections. I have personally encountered the dangers of AI while testing the new Llama AI on WhatsApp. Generative AI can produce dangerous content that may incite conflict among different groups globally, and more powerful AI used in humanoids could pose even greater risks. The potential dangers of AI have become increasingly evident in recent years, such as discrimination and bias, privacy and data protection issues, safety and security concerns, and lack of transparency. These risks are commonly discussed online.

However, I want to highlight what I believe is the most alarming scenario: the loss of creativity. Human addiction to AI will not yield positive results. Currently, generative AI is revolutionizing the world with its powerful capabilities. But if people become overly dependent on AI, we may stop thinking for ourselves. The inventions and discoveries of the past and present are driven by our own thoughts.

For instance, if I ask an AI how to build a ship, it can relay the information and even rearrange the existing ship design into different configurations. Even though there are a thousand possible ways to rearrange the ship, it remains a finite number. We risk ceasing to think independently and relying solely on AI for ideas. After exhausting all the combinations, the AI cannot create a new ship design until we provide new data. But we have lost our creativity by asking AI to do all our job. This leads to a severe gap in creativity.

An AI could never discover E=MC^2 without Einstein's input because it relies on pre-programmed data. In fact, AI itself is a human creation. We cannot allow something we created to consume us. AI is like a black hole; the closer you get, the more easily it can pull you in. Addiction to AI can captivate you, draining your self-imagination.

Let’s say you are solving an aptitude question paper. You copy a question and paste it into a generative AI. You get the results in seconds with steps, but what is the benefit if you are not using your mind, which is still capable of solving the same question? If you solve the question by yourself, your brain can explore different methods and find various ways to answer the same question. Overusing AI leads to a loss of creativity, self-identity and knowledge.