I’m finding myself to become weirdly more tolerant of AI these past couple of months. At the start of last year and the years before I was pretty against the use of it at all, and I think in a lot of ways I still really am against some uses of it. I still worry about it taking jobs away from people and what will really be left for us at the end of the day that AI won’t be able to do itself once it’s become more advanced. Really, I don’t think there will be much the AI won’t be able to do on its own without our help, so I’m not sure where that will leave us in the end in terms of being able to make a living doing anything. I’m also not sure there’s any stopping it at this point. It’s being implemented into everything. Though, despite my many grievances with it, I’m starting to take advantage of its usefulness in giving ideas and figuring out how to get certain projects done. It is very useful as a personal assistant to help accomplish tasks.
Last night I remade my RSS Feed tutorial/introduction blog post and used AI to help me find good privacy-respecting, open source RSS readers for different operating systems, browsers, and mobile os. It also wanted to make the post easy so that older generations who might not be as tech-savvy could understand it and I think I may have accomplished that hopefully. I didn’t have AI write the entire post, but it wrote elements of it, which I edited in parts and merged with writing of my own. I think this use of AI is really practical and helpful in productivity of writing blog posts in this way, but I don’t think it should be used to write entire posts because at that point, it’s no longer yours, it’s completely recycled information, and honestly if you’re just going to have AI do everything for you then what’s the point of doing anything at all? There’s no sense of personal achievement in that, you can’t be proud of what you’ve made because it wasn’t even really you.
So in conclusion, I think right now I’ve accepted AI as being useful as a personal aid, but not in doing everything for us. I’m not sure where AI will lead. I can’t help but feel like we’re all walking towards dystopian hell with some of the ways AI has already been used (ex. creating fake footage and voice recordings of people saying/doing things they didn’t do, ai robot police dogs, big brother ai surveillance technologies, etc). But hopefully as we adapt to this new era of technology, we will also learn how to combat the bad parts of ai with the good/useful parts of ai. And hopefully people will be smart enough not to merge themselves with it and open the door of becoming hackable cyborgs, giving up autonomy over our own bodies and consciousness. Too much of reality is starting to feel like a Black Mirror episode.