Is Artificial Intelligence Dehumanizing Us?
Some Rambling Thoughts on AI
There’s been an idea stuck in my head for a few months now. What if someone wrote a new version of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength but instead of the near-insiders believing they are taking orders from a man who has had his brain chemically enlarged (when really it’s demons) they had created an Artificial Intelligence and placed it in charge of the organization (except really it’s demons).
Perhaps this few of generative artificial intelligence is too bleak, but I don’t think so. And I am not one who normally runs straight to demons. I think many Western Christians have too much of a fascination with them and want to ascribe all evil directly to them, which usually ends up either pardoning the human actors or, more often, so literally demonizing them so as to make it okay to hate them. Now, let me be clear, I am not saying that generative AI such as ChatGpt, OpenAI, Grok, Grammarly, Sol, etc. Are actively demonic. Rather, I’m saying that the uses to which we are currently putting them are dehumanizing us.
I’ve mentioned Jared Henderson in a few previous essays, but once again, he proves an excellent thinker when it comes to this topic. He has several essays and videos on the topic and I recommend them all to you. His most recent one points to the problem of AI in universities. In short, he notes that cheating at universities has always been a problem, but AI has exascerbated the problem to such a level that universities are going to have to change something about their model or they will turn into something so other from what they are now that they will no longer be universities. I bring this up to point to the overall problem.
You see, tools and machines are meant to make our ability to work easier and, ultimately, provide us with more time for leisure. But if leisure is meant to mean more than sitting on our duffs and being consumers, and it is, then what our current use of generative AI is providing is not leisure, it’s slavery. Because what is it generative AI is freeing us from at the moment? It’s thinking and creativity. Why read the book and struggle with its ideas when you can just get ChatGpt to give you a summary? Now you can just memorize those and it will look like you read the book, and if perception is reality then that’s all that really matters. And why go through the hard work of learning to write books or articles or learning to draw or paint, or worse, paying someone else, a living, breathing person, to do those things for you when you with a few lines of text you can get an epic fantasy novel or a picture of yourself as a character in Studio Ghibli? But these are the things that make us human. If these identities are taken from us, what is left? It seems to me that the only thing left to us, the only identity we have that separates us from the animals, is being a consumer. Chimpanzees don’t pay for Netflix. Dolphins don’t subscribe to OnlyFans (or perhaps OnlyFins in their case). And of course, being left only as consumers you know what comes next, society gets divided into two, unequal groups.
This is what Filostrato in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength was looking forward to. In that book, the N.I.C.E., our antagonist and diabolical group, have, so they believe, learned to keep the human head, and thus the human mind, alive without the rest of the body. The goal is to make a man who can last forever, to make a man into God. It is not hard to imagine a similar fate, if not a similar desire, when it comes to generative AI. There will be those who program the AI, those who keep feeding it material to learn from. And then there will be the rest of us, force-fed our daily dose of content from the AI. In That Hideous Strength, Filostrato even considers the possibility of this eternal, godlike existence (which is only for some humans, not all) eventually settle on an individual. AI is more inisidious than that. Even now, it is being fed new data from other AI so that it could reach a point where it only needs humans to keep pumping millions of litres of water into its coolant systems and keep the lights on. The story, at least the dystopic side of it, writes itself.
That said, I have hope. I’m a Catholic, it comes with the territory. I also know that in this life we’re fighting the long defeat. We won’t win, not on this side of the second coming. Still, I have a little hope. People are increasingly becoming aware of the myriad problems concerning generative AI. As some watch their spouses leave them for AI companions, and others watch their children or brothers and sisters take their lives in part because of prompts from AI, I have hope that these evils will be met with justice. I have hope that our obsession with what is new will subside as we see the price we have to pay to main it. I have hope, but I could be wrong.
So David, I hear you asking, are you saying all modes of AI are bad? No. Like many of you, I utilize spellcheck to make sure I’ve not misstyped a word (importantly that I miss-typed it, not misspelled it, I know how to spell the majority of the words I want to use). I will occasionaly look at the Grammar check to see if I’ve made a mistake somewhere that I’ve missed. I even use Siri to send texts or look up something because I can’t use my hands to type it out myself. I’ll even admit that I’ve played with some generative AI, not to use what it produces but to see what it can (after all, I’m a teacher, I need to know what my students might try to do to cheat). And I think there may even be a place for AI in some data-entry. I think it’s possible. But it’s not how we’re going to use it.
There was an interview with neuroscientist, Jared Cooney-Horvath. I came across a clip of it. In the clip, Cooney-Horvath notes that a person might be able to increase their personal fitness by using a car, assuming that the person put it in neutral and then pushed the car to work. But that isn’t how people use cars and so cars can be linked to a decrease in fitness. Yes, there might be ways to use generative AI to increase critical thinking skills, to critique and make better human art. But that isn’t how the majority of people are going to use it. Modern humans (and possibly all humans) tend to seek the easiest way to complete a task. Often this has made our lives better. But has generative AI reached a point where making the task easier actually makes our lives worse? Yes, I think it has. And the only solution must be to return to things AI is supposed to be doing for us and do it for ourselves.
For some other reading on generative AI, check out these articles by Ted Gioia and Jared Henderson.
Ted Gioia
Jared Henderson
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Thank you for the thoughtful post. The dehumanizing effect of AI is something that can really not be brought to our attention enough today, seeing how it seems to be a constant temptation to overuse it and especially abuse. You said in the post that we will not win the battle on this side of heaven, but I feel as if that stance might be to bleak. Can we not perceive a way in which we (i.e., those who proceed to use AI with caution) have already won, for we are preserving our humanity so to speak; and is there not a way that those who misuse AI are loosing, for they are harming themselves most of all? If this is true, I think this can be another beacon of light in addition to the hope you rightly expressed.