AI or not to AI

Title: AI or not to AI

Written by a real human (for better or for worse)

For many years now, we have contemplated and even debated whether or not AI is something we should develop, accept, or even rely on.

Here are some thoughts I’ve been having on this and maybe I’ll even run this through an AI generator to see what it thinks as well (Or should I say they? I’m not sure I’m ready to jump down that rabbit hole yet.)

First thought is that a true AI would actually be an intelligence of its own (Artificial Intelligence). So many of the “AI” projects are not quite the AI we think of after watching the old movies like Terminator, iRobot, or even AI.

I personally like the human factor in transactions like a grocery store, convenience store, and even McDonald’s. I am not a fan of self checkout or pulling up to a drive through and having some “clear” English voice say HELLO will you be using the mobile app to place your order today! And then quickly followed by someone multitasking my order request, processing someone else’s payment, and trying to look like they are being pleasant with the person in the car at the same time.

Who is really benefiting from these self checkout things anyway? The employee will at first say it helps them, but in the end it helps them out of a job and makes more money for the company.?

I’ve watched it happen; about 10 years ago there was a sweet lady who could barely stand but she scanned my groceries faster than I could get my card out of my wallet. She was not very pleasant to talk to towards the end of her shift (understandably), but I asked her one night what she thought about the 4 self checkout lanes they just installed and she said she really didn’t care and it gave her more time to stand around. The next time I saw her, they had replaced all the cashiers with self checkout and she was hunched over sitting on the floor, trying to stock shelves. I never saw her again after that but I could see was they replaced her with a machine and now I do her job with no pay benefit and I don’t get that human interaction we all need.

Having an “AI” program to write your advertisements, school papers, books, and even movies removes human interaction as well. When you read something written by a human there are so many factors that come into how the writing style is, shall we say, performed. For example; I started this as a quick short comment to a post about AI, but as other unique distractions affect my environment, I choose different words and interrupted thought even changes the flow of my writing. The birds around me make me think of nature, the lawn mower that someone just started makes me think of pollution, and the heat of a mid day sun causes me to take a pause and look around at the world around me. All of this will affect the next few lines of whatever this is I am writing.

An “AI '' program (and that IS what it is) has no distractions, no interactions to the moving world around it, and spits out results to follow rules of writing based on whatever guidlines that were programmed into it.

I have to stop and ask the question; do we really want to build a world where most of it is AI generated??

• Do we want our advertising to be written by AI?
• Do we want our books to be written by AI?
• Do we want our buildings, our cities, our cars, etc. designed by AI?
• Do we want to give up the human factor to our world around us?

Don’t get me wrong, I find it fascinating to see the results and what the “AI” generator comes up with, but after multiple generated products, they all start to sound or feel the same. I prefer the individuality we get from the human touch; that is something “AI” cannot give us. Good or bad, entertaining or not, my opinion is we need the human touch.