At this point in time, it’s impossible to deny that we’ve entered the era of artificial intelligence. AI chatbots have entered our homes, our workplaces, and now with the CSU’s AI initiative, our schools.
Despite the push for this technology, I remain skeptical of it, not just for the ethics of its development or its environmental impact, but the fact it has enveloped our world at a particularly frightening time.
Fascism is on the rise, and it’s becoming more and more important to think for ourselves as the media becomes increasingly filled with far-right lies and propaganda. It’s in this regard that, to me, the scariest issue with AI is that it asks you to do just the opposite of thinking for yourself: it asks you to outsource your thinking to a machine.
What do I mean by this? When someone speaks with an AI chatbot, it isn’t just limited to answering basic questions; it can also generate checklists, solutions to a variety of problems, and even a multitude of creative works, all with a simple prompt. Also, the fact that it speaks to you like a human makes it easier to talk to in a casual manner and keep conversations going for longer. These aspects of chatbots make them easy to become dependent on, resulting in some users speaking to an AI for even the most basic of questions. In other words, you effectively stop thinking for yourself, and allow a chatbot to do any sort of critical thinking for you.
And with the world we’re living in right now, where far-right rhetoric and hatred is being increasingly validated by our president and his peers, it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to let a machine think for you. After all, AI chatbots are maintained by profit-driven corporations who, if they wanted to, could control the narrative, twisting one’s thinking by forcing a chatbot to adhere to a specific political agenda.
There are real examples of this at this point in time, such as X’s “Grok” AI chatbot, of which billionaire and X owner Elon Musk has repeatedly tried to force into fitting his political beliefs, resulting in extremist results from the AI, such as deeming itself “MechaHitler” and spewing antisemetic sentiments. Of course, this is a rather blatant example of trying to force the AI in a specific line of thinking, but who knows what other ways in which fascist ideas could be inserted into these systems? Should we really be letting these chatbots think for us when they have been shown to harbor such biases?
I can only hope that, over time, people will become more aware of the connections between AI and current politics, but with how much AI is being pushed right now onto pretty much everyone, it’s hard to say how things will go or how it will affect people in the long run. But one thing’s for sure: the more you depend on AI, the more likely you are to let AI do all your critical thinking for you. And in this day and age, when misinformation is running rampant, you need to be able to think for yourself.
