This week: On AI Edited by: Kit  
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Are you a fan of AI? How do you use it? Have you used AI in your creative works?
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about artificial intelligence - both its risks and its benefits.
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Have you ever used AI to help you with your writing? Perhaps you’ve used it to generate ideas, or to help you perfect what you already had.
I haven’t yet. I don’t know if I ever will. Not for my creative writing, anyway, because I figure that the whole point of being creative is to, well, be creative – to translate my imagination, thoughts and emotions into my own words, in my own unique style.
I love to write. I’m not the best at it; I call myself an enthusiastic amateur. What is great, though, is when I look back at my older work, and I can see how far I have come during my time here. I have made progress, and that progress is all mine. It is fun as well when I dig through my portfolio and find a story or a poem that I’ve forgotten and it’s really good! I feel a sense of pride, then, that I’ve come up with that. I doubt you’d get that same feeling when you read something you’ve created with AI.
That doesn’t mean that I am against using any and all technology. I use Microsoft Word and am thankful for the squiggly lines to point out a typo. I also, on occasion, use Capitalize My Title , and RhymeZone is an excellent resource for poets. The content of my items, though, that’s all me. For better or worse. Perhaps it would be better if I used AI, but what would that really mean for my work?
We’re at a stage where AI is everywhere. I’m not a big social media user, but I do lurk on Reddit and it’s becoming ever harder to spot if posts there are real or not real. Some are hidden advertisements, some are rage bait, and many, even in advice forums, are created through AI. There are some signs that I have learned to pick up on. The structure, the repeated themes, the “random bits between quotation marks”. What I don’t know is why people create these fake posts. It may be amusing to see how others respond, but the result is that many are now questioning what is real and not real, to the point where even genuine posts are accused of being fake.
When you Google pretty much anything, you will find AI images, and AI pages, and AI information. This may sound helpful, but AI is far from reliable. In fact, it’s not uncommon for it to be wrong. The other day I read about a person who followed a recipe they’d found on the Internet, and it turned out to be a fake, created by AI. They hadn’t noticed because there’s been a trend of any recipe being preceded by the chef’s entire life story, so many people scroll through that without reading. Whatever waffle AI had created there, then, went unnoticed… until the person ended up with a great big mess. Whilst that was a waste of time and ingredients, incorrect information can be dangerous. You can be given the wrong information regarding your health, for example. A year or two ago health advisors at an eating disorder centre were replaced with a chat bot, and instead of offering proper advice, those seeking assistance were pushed further into the disorder.
Students are being accused of using AI when they have not. Others believe they have found relevant references, but it turns out that the sources do not exist. The UK government is pushing hard for AI to be used in many departments, and I find this concerning not just because of the inaccuracies, but because we’re losing the human factor. Whilst humans are flawed, and we can make our own mistakes, we’re also a lot better at assessing matters on a case-by-case basis. We can spot nuance, find creative solutions. We’re more willing to go that extra mile if needed, in order to help someone. Can AI do the same? Will it?
Maybe I’d just getting old. It’s said that older people are incapable of keeping up with the times, and with technological advances, and that may well be what’s happening with me. I don’t know. I actually find AI interesting. When I studied Philosophy and Psychology I enjoyed the debates on whether or not AI could ever grow to be sentient, and what the moral and legal implications of this would be. I cannot help but think, however, that we’re rushing into this, and that we are unprepared for the consequences.
In order to create stories and poetry AI’s scraped through countless existing stories and poems, without regard for ownership. This is concerning, when one believes in the importance of copyright. And who owns a poem, or a story, or an essay created by AI? Is it you, or the owners of the AI bot?
With the growth of AI, AI will eventually feed on AI, and that has the potential to distort results even more. I already do not enjoy the endless questioning we have to do because of misinformation and disinformation, bots and AI posts – real or not real, true or not true? It’d be terrible if it got worse. How would that affect our health and well-being, if we could no longer trust anything we see online, or hear, or read?
Some good uses of AI, I feel, could be in the assistance of research. Searching for themes and patterns could be of great use in a variety of fields, including medicine. I hope that AI modelling will also lessen the need for animal research. And it may be that I am too doom and gloom about it. Surely, with time, accuracy will improve.
In the creative field, though, I feel it’s fair to say that it’s not for me. The beauty of creative writing is, in my opinion, that writers share something of themselves. A piece of their mind, their heart, their soul. There is a connection between reader and writer, where thoughts, and feelings, and experiences blend, and I don’t think you can get that with AI. AI doesn’t have a heart. It doesn’t have a soul. It doesn’t know what it is to be human. All it can produce are echoes of human emotion.
And I wouldn’t get anything out of it myself. No doubt there are those who love pondering inputs and seeing what comes out, but I love catching a spark of inspiration and putting pen to paper.
What about you? Are you a fan of AI?
Kit
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Spiritual: January 15, 2025 Issue [#12935]
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