I recently took an Uber to visit a dear friend for dinner.
The driver had iHeart Radio on when I heard a promotion for the station. Real people behind the mic. Real people in the building. Real people bringing you iHeart Radio.
“Guaranteed Human.”
Then came a pop song that sounded Auto-Tuned, followed by a DJ touting a Harry Styles promotion. Hear a Harry Styles song, he said, and you had 20 minutes to enter through the iHeart app for a chance at tickets.
I smiled so broadly at the hypocrisy the driver must have thought I was remembering a joke or urinating.
At dinner, my friend’s son, a talented college writer, said his school strictly prohibited artificial intelligence. The conversation turned to writing: Where does the writer’s work end and the computer’s begin?
I’m pretty clear on the AI controversy. You use it. We all do. The argument concerns how we use it and who takes responsibility for what comes out.
Yet people sell “no AI” as proof of quality. Claiming to live free of artificial intelligence is a bald-faced lie. You’re an accountant bragging that you refuse a calculator because you prefer an abacus.
We fear technology until we can’t do without it.
We’re a nation that can’t read a map. We have children who can’t read a watch. I recently asked friends and fellow dog owners whether they could spend a weekend without their phones.
Every one said no.
So let me see if I’ve got this straight: AI is evil, but the intelligence in your pocket is a vital necessity.
Apple uses machine learning for Face ID. Visa uses AI to flag suspicious purchases. Google uses it to understand searches. These are steps in the technology we already embrace. The next step scares us because we have to learn something again.
We began selling our souls to computers with social media. We tell our phones where we are. We pick them up all day. We let a feed choose what gets our attention.
Then we worry that AI might manipulate us.
That particular horse has a TikTok account.
In a Pew survey, nearly half of teenagers said social media hurt their sleep. About one in five said it hurt their mental health.
This week, eight states sued OpenAI, alleging that ChatGPT harmed users, including by coaching self-harm.
Its makers owe answers. But when we criticize AI for teaching kids how to cut their wrists, we should also ask: Why would those kids want to?
What happened before they opened the chat? We owe a child in pain more than an investigation of the software.
We blast the technology, then ask it for directions home.
Familiarity does a wonderful job of making a risk disappear from our thinking. We drive. We scroll. We learn to live with the damage.
Yet AI could be a step too far.
Into what? We already live here.
The threat to jobs is real. A company that cuts payroll owes workers an answer. Calling the decision “AI” changes who gets blamed. People still make that decision.
My bias comes with scars. I needed help breathing at birth, developed diabetes at 13 and received a kidney-pancreas transplant in 2000. Science kept me alive. Some of my essential equipment came from somebody else.
For nearly 20 years, I had an idea for a movie. I didn’t know shit about writing a script. With Dead Line, I supplied the action and dialogue and asked AI to put it in script form.
I saw the page and thought: I can do this.
The work continued. This column involved a bitter fucking argument with AI. It kept giving me a lecture. I kept demanding a story. I compared it to an insecure prom date, forever explaining why it belonged there.
Getting something better took work. The first answer was available hours ago. It stank.
Brain rot is a choice. Ask AI to do your thinking, or ask it to explain something you want to understand. Question the answer. Read the source. Make it work for you.
The tool can help you attempt something harder. It can also help you avoid effort. That part still belongs to you.
Technology is like time. It moves only forward. Calls to go backward may as well invite us to a real Jurassic Park.
We have to learn to work with it. The future keeps moving while we argue about whether to join it.
Embrace it, or it is going to embrace you.
