Artificial Intelligence, a Friend… or a Foe?
by Gay Yellen
Recently, our local newspaper devoted an entire page of articles with disturbing headlines on the subject. The lead essay announced this: AI-HUMAN HYBRID EYED TO PREVENT ROGUE AI. My mind’s eye instantly conjured up the scary image of a human-robot cyborg. Hard to say what form it might actually take, but there’s no comfort in this quote from a co-founder of the tech start-up behind the idea: “I think we still have a lot to learn from humans.” Gee, thanks.
The second headline felt like a slap in the face:
AI COMPANIES DESTROYING MORE BOOKS THAN YOU THINK. People who write for a living are painfully aware of the literary larceny perpetrated by e-book pirate sites that secretly clone our books for their own profit. But this topic goes beyond the personal.
Scott Brown, a seller of rare books in Portland, Oregon, is up in arms against AI companies that slice off a book’s bindings before scanning the pages and dumping what’s left. The majority of those tomes may result from the glut of over-ordered, unsold “best-sellers,” but too often, rare books are also turned into mulch, despite alternate scanning methods that do not harm the original. I’m currently researching a subject that reaches back centuries, and it’s already hard enough to find original accounts from those years. The thought of losing even one rare resource is… well, I don’t want to think about it.
Old-fashioned copycat plagiarism still happens, too.
It happened to me when I was the editor of a national monthly magazine. The perpetrator was a freelancer from Australia who was looking for assignments in the U.S. He dropped off a few work samples with his resume and asked to return the next day to see if I would hire him.
Looking through his material, I spied an article on a topic I’d covered months earlier, so I pulled that one out to read first. By the end of the second paragraph, the words seemed eerily familiar. Long story short, he had blatantly copied—word for word and comma for comma—a piece I’d written for an issue we’d published months before. The only difference was his name in the byline instead of mine.
Now that literary larceny has gone digital, it’s much more common. Thank goodness for sites like Writer Beware and professional groups like The Authors Guild and Sisters in Crime to spread the word to help writers fend the off the hoodlums.
We’re told that AI benefits myriad of professions, and it’s true. Even for a writer, it’s useful for quick fact-checking. But too often, the information it spits out is just plain wrong.
I’ve heard that some publishers use AI to flag the increasing number of bot-written submissions in their over-burdened slush piles. Sounds good. But apparently, an AI weed-eater cannot always distinguish between AI-slop and a truly original manuscript from a human author. It is known to have flagged a legitimate writer’s work for using an em-dash instead of a period or a comma or some other grammatical styling. Almost every author I know employs an em-dash when it’s needed, including me.
Distractions like these can seep into the creative process, leading some authors to second-guess their choices at every turn. Currently, my focus is on the way-back-when, and I rely on sources from centuries ago. Instead of leading me to a list of possible sources, the web often offers up AI summaries in reply to my query. And too often, the bot gets it wrong.
Will human creativity be erased from history?
Will the same happen to humans? An article in the New Yorker some months back contained this quote from the Nobel prize-winning “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it grows up, you should worry.”
So, will AI be a benefit to humankind, or be a threat to our existence?
Gay Yellen’s award-winning writing career began in magazine journalism. She also was the contributing editor for the international thriller, Five Minutes to Midnight (Delacorte), which debuted as a New York Times “Notable.” Her Samantha Newman Mystery Series is packed with suspense and laced with touches of romance, heart, and humor. On Amazon , or to order from your favorite bookseller.
Oh, Gay, great blog and something I worry about every day.
So do I, Donnell. It’s so hard to avoid, too, even in writing this post. I usually include a few related graphics with my posts, but in trying to search for some to go with this one, all that came up were generated by AI. So, the only ones I used are pre-AI.
The challenge, I think, is to maintain humanity, critical thinking, and compassionate feelings in all that we do, in all our professions and occupations, in our reading and writing. AI will take over everything else, but those are reserved for us.
I’d like to be hopeful, Saralyn. Problem is, with the rising use of AI to write essays and reports (including Master’s and PhD theses, I’m not sure they’re doing much critical thinking these days.
The news of the three or so rogue incidents in the past few weeks brings me back to thoughts of Star Trek or The Twilight Zone. Both had episodes where everything seemed perfect, but…. I fear that will be the case here, too, and yet things are zooming ahead. I’d like to read this blog with an update a year from now.
Thanks, Debra. I’d like to be around to do it!
It’s a scary world for authors and publishers. And I worry that critical thinking will go the way of cursive writing.
Ditto, Judy. According to a professor friend of mine it’s already happening.
This is so true and worrisome. But we need to be aware of it. Thanks for the reminder.
I hate being a Debbie Downer, Kathleen, but the more I read about it, and the more my computer urges me to let it “help” me, the more concerned I get. In the meantime, I try to stay positive.
Everyday the news coming out of the tech world regarding AI is getting scarier and scarier!
Agreed!