15 years ago, AI was something I studied briefly at university (during a brief few years of insanity where I thought it was better to chase a practical career than to follow my creative dreams). It was considered “way off”; a mere topic to theorise about, philosophically, which reminds me of another university subject that I was far more passionate about than the one I was actually doing.
It certainly didn’t seem that 10 years later AI would be stealing the brain cells of a whole generation of people.
Admittedly, I’m one of those people. I ChatGPT the hell out of everything on a near-daily basis and I’m not sure there’s any going back. I use it for fact-checking, symptom-checking, recipes, wedding prep, appliance instructions, exercise routines, jokes, word origins, film suggestions, book suggestions, insect identification, funky smell concerns, ADHD diagnoses… And of course ChatGPT is a great therapist, so much so that I’ve had to personify him and give him a name.
However, in a last ditch attempt to hold onto whatever sense of creativity I have left, I’ve made a pact to write this blog without AI. By that I mean I will write it; Gavin can simply proofread it to make sure I’ve not made any critical errors of any kind (although he’s awful at that: he tries to strip the human out of everything and I have to tell him no).
But while I choose to keep some distance from AI, an entire generation is growing up without ever knowing what that distance feels like; they don’t know a world from before. And I personally think we’ve reached a critical point in time where we have to step in and “save the children”. It has gone too far and their minds are being literally fried by social media and Artificial Intelligence. Bye bye attention spans. Bye bye reasoning. Bye bye problem-solving. Bye bye thinking skills, writing skills, communication skills. Onto a world where every moment of boredom is filled with the instant gratification of a machine, every problem can be outsourced, every gap in knowledge can be immediately filled, and we become less and less human.
Some of the most important aspects of being human happen in the moments that we now fill with our phones: the daydreaming, the theorising, the getting things wrong and figuring things out for ourselves. And if we’re not careful, one day all this will be gone.
And there’ll be no-one left to think.