I’ve decided I won’t use AI in the writing of this blog. It’s not that I’m against AI, I use it every day, but I wanted to get my thoughts out – my own thoughts – about some aspects of the AI revolution that I’m finding disquieting.
We’re not having a conversation about how people feel about the relentless embedding of AI at work. In my area, it’s nearly all about efficiency; find information, sift and synthesise and summarise, make processes flow, save people’s time for “value-adding work.” It’s not always clear what that is, but there’s an underlying message that AI is so good for efficiency, we should look for ways to adopt it as quickly as we can. I couldn’t argue with the end goal, but some people are less quick to pick up and run with technological tools, and maybe they’re feeling rushed or pressured, or held back from going further, or anxious about their jobs. Crucially, in my experience, we haven’t asked them.
I’m particularly exercised at the moment by questions of creativity, originality and attribution. You’ll doubtless have heard some of the controversy from the arts, where entire bands, films, movie stars have been generated by AIs aggregating features from those already in existence. In research and education, the subjects of originality and innovation are front and centre, so academic areas are talking critically about AI’s role all the time. But in professional services I’ve come across it much less.
At the heart of this, for me, is the interaction of AI capabilities with our real-life human ethics. There’s a universal principle, sometimes enshrined in laws, that you don’t take credit for other people’s creations. We all know that some people transgress this. But our understanding of creativity and originality, developed over thousands of years, is being re-written in the blink of an eye. All culture builds on something that went before. Music is written by people who have absorbed many tunes and whose minds consciously and unconsciously make something new from that experience. Technological tools have helped with this for the last 50 years, so is it very different from asking a computer to scan a great expanse of human knowledge and do the same?
I think it is, because what’s becoming obscured is the hand of the creator. We know that AI can’t think like a human, and certainly not in subconscious ways, so all those embodied experience, instincts and senses that make something a human creation are not being used by AIs. Whether it’s a grand symphony or a LinkedIn post, our ethical responsibility is to figure out when that matters, when it doesn’t, and be honest about who’s done what. We also need to think about what we value and care about. If you enjoy an AI-generated song, should I care? If someone has used Co-Pilot to structure and tidy up their email, should I care? If someone starts a piece of work by asking an AI for ideas, or even a complete solution, should I care? Actually, I think I do. Because I will then never know if it was your work, and you will stop being able to do things for yourself.
Of course, you may not care. And there is the thing I believe we should talk about more than we do. How do I feel about AI, and among all the benefits and costs, what should I care about?
Respond