Don't let AI companies trick you into dependency
The recent innovations of AI, such as its ability to debug codes and analyze medical information, have found numerous ways of improving the efficiency of our society’s necessary functions. However, many companies have overinvested in AI and are scrambling to make their investments profitable. This has led to AI being pushed into every possible crevice to recoup the egregious expenditures.
From search results to social media to streaming, practically every time you go online, you are immediately faced with an option to use some form of AI. This is all flashy and convenient, but it ultimately allows us to do nothing new. There are many problems with this proliferation of AI that can’t all be covered here, but the one that seems to me the biggest — and which is incidentally, extremely profitable for the companies — is that it takes away independence.
AI has become capable of replacing human effort in ways too numerous to count, but this problem is well-illustrated with the specific task of writing an essay. As shown in an MIT study, repeated usage of AI culminates in a lack of attachment to the work, reliance on the software in order to perform the task and overall cognitive decline.
When AI becomes a part of the thought process, the human brain suffers a reduced ability to function without it. This acknowledged, it becomes all too clear why companies would want to push AI as hard as possible in every circumstance; they can make a lot more money from something that people have lost their ability to function without.
In our increasingly subscription-based economy, we can see the profitable tactic of a company selling access to something while retaining ownership of it. AI dependency allows companies to sell consumers access to the cognitive abilities they once personally possessed.
Aside from financial exploitation, outsourcing part of your thought process to a foreign entity opens the door to another, potentially far worse possibility: ideological manipulation. If you depend on AI to read, write, text, send emails, think critically and even deal with personal problems, you are vulnerable to its biases. These biases are currently accidental; programs like ChatGPT are influenced by whatever information they sweep in, regardless of its validity.
However, it is not unfathomable that these biases could be made to serve selfish purposes. In addition to introducing its biases, AI also creates a sense of detachment from the work that it is used for, as shown in the aforementioned study; people who used AI to write essays felt less ownership over their work than those who didn’t, and were less capable of quoting from essays they had just written. If reliance on AI causes users to not only be subject to its biases but also to care less about what they use it to create, then the users’ output will reflect the AI more than themselves.
AI will soon put an unprecedented amount of power over human thought into the hands of those who own it.
If what I just described seems undesirable, resist the trap of convenience and avoid relying on AI to do anything that you yourself are capable of. You are a rational and creative agent, capable of uniquely synthesizing ideas. Value your mind’s independence and what it can do. If you do not control your own ability to think, someone else will.
