My workplace is cramming using AI down our throats and it’s getting a little old. I’ve found niche uses for AI in my daily job, but not to the extent that my workplace wants me to use it. In fact, I took time to experiment on something new and did some research to find the best approach on fixing a problem. I was told that I was wasting time and effort for not just prompting AI to do the work for me instead of learning how to do it on my own. Is that what we’re reducing ourselves to? Getting so dumb that we can’t tell anymore whether AI is being factual and accurate or just telling us what we want to see for an approval thumb’s up?

The New York Times recently published an article on college leaders using AI with their grading, presentations, and lectures but not disclosing they were using AI as they demand from their students. Hypocrisy much? I’m in a college program myself and typically use AI on a regular basis to make my writing sound better. I still do my own research, outlining, and most of my writing and lean on AI to help polish it out. On a typical AI check on any of the free checker sites, I usually have 20% or lower AI content that indicates human writing. I have started disclosing where and when I use AI in my papers so that I’m not accused of doing something that would get me kicked out. I’ve caught my own classmates and some professors of using AI in blatant and purposeful ways. You know, see em-dashes, sentences with 3 items, and the obvious “not just X, but also Y” statements. Honestly, I don’t really care that much if you’re honest, it’s the ones that use AI to skip out on the work that I have an issue with.

I really think we’re on a ledge, looking over, trying to figure out how AI is going to go over the next few years to a decade. There are too many people actually in the AI industry that are raising those warning flags for me to ignore it. I don’t subscribe to the idea that whoever wins AI wins from the idiot administration in the white house. There is no winning if AI takes over our lives in such a way that we are slowly made less intelligent to the inevitable decline of critical thinking and daily living. I forget the name of the movie, but the population was connected to a central computer system that gave the population access to all information and skills needed for any situation. One guy was made a pariah for not being able to have an implant that connected him to the hive. When the hive was ultimately shutdown to save humanity, the guy not connected was the smartest person in the world and had to teach everyone how to read, write, and think on their own without immediate access to all information. How do we know that isn’t already starting to happen? I mean, flat earther’s, MAGA, and moon landing conpiracists exist. The dumbing down of the population has already started.

The future of AI is murky and unknown still at this point. Our decisions now will dictate how this goes and whether we retain control of our own creation or become it’s subjugated minions in some sort of Terminator Matrix mashup dystopian future.