Does Artificial Intelligence Make Us More Intelligent?

March 7, 2023

Cue the space-like music in the background…..

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Ah, Star Trek. I was never a Trekkie. I make no apologies when admitting to never having watched an episode or a movie. I am aware that, back in the day, it was popular entertainment that stimulated people’s imagination about all things science fiction.

“Back in the day” has arrived. What seemed to be far-fetched in the not-so-distant past, is now around us. Communicators from Star Trek have become our cell phones. Tricorders are our present-day MRI and CT scans. Transporters are our GPS systems. QUIDS are looking like a rumour called digital currency. From what I could gather, the crew occasionally even had battles with rogue computers (Nomad and Landru).

And with that thought, enter Artificial Intelligence, AKA AI.

AI has been finding its way into our real, day-to-day lives for a while now. Wearable technology, Siri, Alexa, and the lovely lady who talks to you in your vehicle telling you to turn left are increasingly prevalent examples of AI.

The pluses and minuses of allowing this sort of technology into your life should be on your to-do list to soul search as you decide how much of your privacy you want to give up in the name of convenience.

The recent storm of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has taken this AI concept to another level and captured the attention...and enthusiasm...of many.

What does this all mean?

ChatGPT is what is called a chatbot. This means it’s a conversational form of AI. It understands and can generate actual text in its response to a question from you. How does it do this? It has been programmed/trained with billions of words and ideas. Yes, it's more complex than that, but that's the simple version.

Ask this chatbot a question, much like you would when you are using a search engine like Google, and it can answer in an "intelligent" way by writing code, entire essays, poetry, song lyrics and much more. Pretty much anything you want.

It is promoted as a way to let technology do the time-consuming work for you. You know, the menial work that isn’t much fun. Supposedly then, the writers can then spend their time adding the human touch of their originality and creativity.

The company which created ChatGPT is called OpenAI. It has become the latest darling in the tech startup world. What started out as a non-profit endeavour has turned into a for-profit company. Interestingly, and not surprisingly, Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI. Other companies are in hot pursuit with similar versions of their own. Who comes out on top will remain a mystery for now.

To embrace this technology or not to embrace it?

Here are my thoughts on why I will strongly identify as a non-embracer:

Creativity

Does having a chatbot write your essay or song, dehumanize the effort? Being creative is an important part of being human. Otherwise, we are just drones. Creativity is usually inspired by emotions and this makes it special and unique. I wonder how the music of Beethoven or the prose of the world's most famous poets would be without the passion behind the creation.

Critical Thinking Skills

Is anybody else concerned about the demise of critical thinking skills that may result in having a chatbot just give you the information in a coherent paragraph or essay? These skills have already taken a nose-dive with the instant gratification that comes with search engines. The dwindling process of actual research may become non-existent.

Bias

The information that ChatGPT puts out is only as good as the information that it was programmed with. This should be a gigantic red flag to people. There is a BIG bias problem with this. As has been revealed, Big Media is not your friend. They give a very skewed, government-directed narrative. Then there's cancel culture which is running rampant. If some group doesn’t like something, it’s cancelled or deleted from history. If chatbots are created/programmed by humans, it makes sense that the information can be manipulated. What becomes truth?

Lazy?

We've gone from the actual process of going to the library to find multiple resources to write an essay to searching on the world wide web for sources which very often are just plagiarized versions of some long lost original to now just having AI generate your essay. What is this doing to the human race? I know educators are scrambling how to implement this into their classrooms. It is already being used by their students as assignments are becoming eerily similar. How to effectively use this technology is going to be an ongoing concern. Until it's forgotten that it should be concerning and it becomes the new standard.

Yuck

I find AI in general, downright creepy.

For this non-embracer, it comes down to this: Does artificial intelligence make us more intelligent? My answer is no.

How far will this go? I suppose as far as people let it. Right now, the excitement of it will override the thoughts of any downside.

I may be left in the dust with this. Call me an old crow. I am fine with that. I had thought about getting ChatGPT to write this month’s blog as a test. Maybe it would have been able to do a better job than what you just read that comes from my mind, heart, and fingertips.

I opted to do this old-school instead.

Beam me up Scotty!