Artificial intelligence is truly one of the best tools we have at our disposal as a human species, and it’s simultaneously the worst product to ever hit the world. The potential is there for something extraordinary to develop. However, it’s quite possibly, the worst technological advancement of the human race. That is mainly because too many people have already deemed it perfect when it has a slew of problems. The sources of the information can lead to lousy, misleading, or overall false answers, and people are using it to replace human responsibilities, which are currently much more capable than robots to do the task.
Right now AI is just a fancy search engine. It’s been fed the entire internet (which I apologize for, robots, I’m so sorry that we did that to you) and been asked to answer any questions, which it does by just summarizing the information it’s been taught in a way a human would talk. This does not erase the fact that it’s just Google with a slick new look.
It is not amazing that it can summarize things for you. If you say, “Write an essay!” It can do that, but it’s not doing it in any remarkable way. It reads many essays about the same topic and compiles all of those into one “essay.” It isn’t capable of creating new thoughts or dialogue because it is a computer, so you’ll just have to deal with the fact that it’s entirely plagiarized. This isn’t useful. You could just copy and paste several parts from different essays about whatever topic you wanted yourself. Better yet, you could’ve just written the essay yourself. By asking your little chatbot friend to do that, you’ve just consumed 2.9 Watt Hours (Wh) of energy, three times more than any Google search according to a study by BestBrokers.
To summarize the study, the number of queries submitted to the program per week uses 43,000 times more power than an average household in the United States. I feel like it’s necessary to restate how insane that number is. So many people are asking their robot friends to write essays for them that it’s using thousands more energy than your entire house does. We’re already in an energy crisis. We seriously do not need any more issues piling on top of that.
So AI is using all of this power, and it’s not even doing its job properly. AI is still a new model and is subject to a lot of errors. For example, if you ask for help with a math problem, there’s a chance it will give an incorrect answer or a weird explanation because it’s been subjected to the horror of, again, the whole internet. The internet isn’t always accurate, but AI doesn’t know that. It can make assumptions about what’s accurate and what isn’t based on all of its knowledge, but it’s not all-knowing.
In all honesty I’ve used ChatGPT a few times. For the most part, I use it to assist my understanding of certain concepts I’ve learned in class and asking for practice with topics I need extra work on.
However, I use it with the understanding that it is awful and that it can have wrong answers. I have had to correct the robot more than once. It’s not a tool you should completely rely on without your own expertise or extra research. This, I think, is part of the worst habits consumers have with the product. AI should not be treated as a replacement for humans or education.
AI can also generate pictures. I don’t like that either. It’s not drawing anything. It doesn’t even know what it’s doing. It’s learned what images are associated with what words, which means it’s assigned what certain colored pixels next to other certain pixels are defined as. Then it “draws” a really pretty picture for you, using art from real people, with weird inconsistencies and a really weird smooth look to the whole thing. I don’t know why it’s not common knowledge that using people’s art without their expressed permission to make your own “art” is stealing, but let me tell you right now that it is.
Not only that but generating “art” with AI is stupid. I can’t think of another way to phrase it besides that. The entire point of art is that it originates from the human hand. What is the point of getting a robot to do that for you? Please do not answer that question with the fact that it’s “easier.” It’s not easier. It still needs human artwork to complete a task for you. The humans who made that art did not find it easy, but they at least found it enjoyable. For what purpose are you using AI to make a picture for you? I guarantee that there’s probably a stock image that works a billion times better than that and it doesn’t violate the integrity of art.
Despite all of that, AI still has amazing potential. If we prioritize the help that it can give us without overriding the things that we humans can do ourselves, it would be an amazing tool. It’s not there yet, so my best advice is to not use it at all unless you’re really struggling. And even then, prioritize the humans that made it work for you first—so even if you just don’t want to write that one essay, know that anything you write is better than what a bunch of metal could configure for you anyway.