For quite a while now, someone has been living inside my computer, writing emails for me.
I don’t recall signing up for this artificial intelligence feature, which is like having a word valet. It’s in my phone, too, which offers three serviceable but impersonal responses I can fire off to someone who has just sent me an email pitching a story or asking if I want to meet for coffee.
“I’d like to do coffee,” was one of the suggested responses to a recent email. “Let me circle back soon about timing.”
One argument for these features is that they can save time and free me up for more important tasks. But it takes longer for me to read the three fabricated email options than it would take to write my own response.
I find this really irritating for about 150 reasons, one of which is that in an ever-automated world, it’s another nail in the coffin of human interaction. And yes, there are at least 150 reasons. I know because I asked AI and it spit them out in approximately three seconds. No. 148: “It sounds like it’s written by a committee.”
A fair share of nasty feedback lands in my mailbox, so I wondered if the auto-response tool could come in handy. But the robot isn’t salty enough to be of service. “Thanks for reading” was the suggested reply to someone who called me a hopeless loon and another guy who wondered why anybody would read my “dumb column.”
On second thought, maybe the unruffled, dismissive response is the way to go. But the bigger concern is what happens to human intelligence as artificial intelligence does more of our writing, researching, communicating and thinking.
If a middle school, high school or college student can easily use a computer tool to fire off a book report or an essay, what’s the impact on vocabulary, grammar, reading, critical thinking, originality, intellectual curiosity?
On learning?
“There’s no nose like an English teacher’s nose,” said Mike Finn, a recently retired L.A. Unified instructor who said teachers can tell when a student’s work is original or is not and try to steer them clear of shortcuts and plagiarism.
But it’s easier than ever for a student to get lazy. In a New Yorker article last year by a college professor, students characterized AI-enabled cheating as a widespread and resourceful way to avoid wasting time on material that didn’t interest them. “I’m trying to do the least work possible,” said one student.
My son, a college librarian, has seen that phenomenon as well as a general erosion of research skills and decision-making aptitude among some students.
“They can’t choose a book from among thousands of books for a research project and don’t even want to because they think they can get the information more easily from a computer,” he said.
Jenn Wolfe, a Cal State Northridge professor of secondary education, said the use of AI is “a very heated topic right now,” and at high schools and middle schools, some teachers “are going back to paper and pen, from what I see and hear.”
I met Wolfe in 2013, when she was an L.A. Unified high school teacher getting used to the introduction of iPads in classrooms.
“This is not a teacher and it’s not a student, either,” she wisely said of the iPad at the time. “It’s a tool.”
Professor Sarah W. Beck, chair of NYU’s department of teaching and learning, echoed that idea of adapting to evolving technology.
“I think AI denial or AI refusal is not a useful stance because it’s here to stay,” said Beck, so the key is to understand the benefits and reduce the risks.
She told me she had just come from an education class in which future teachers “for the most part are quite skeptical of AI. They’re not AI refusers, but they’re very attuned to its limitations and really value the human dialogue around writing.”
There’s no denying that AI can be helpful as a research tool, to explore themes and to help writers frame their thoughts. It’s also useful in ways not limited to writing. It helped me replace a toilet tank flush valve a couple of weeks ago, for instance. And I just had a tooth extracted and wondered about the advantages and disadvantages of getting an implant. AI fed me oodles of information on the pros and cons.
For writing, Beck said, it can organize your notes or perform “formulaic writing” tasks.
“We need to learn how to use these tools in a way that gives us more time to devote to the parts of writing that really matter,” she said.
We need to be careful, too.
When we’re fire-hosed instructions, analysis, pre-fab emails, ready-made manuscripts and unsolicited offers of help, where does all of that come from? Who input the information? Do the creators have an agenda? Are students taught to be discerning about what information is credible?
A Cornell University study released this month suggests that AI writing assistants can not only influence how we write, but how we think.
Researchers observed 2,500 participants who wrote on several controversial topics including the death penalty, fracking and voting rights. Some were provided biased information through AI autocomplete writing tools, and based on surveys before and after the exercise, their views shifted in the direction of the bias even if they were made aware of the bias.
“We know these models are controlled by large and powerful organizations, and they may or may not have a viewpoint they want to embody or promote, and there’s potential for abuse,” said Mor Naaman, professor of information science at Cornell Tech and senior author of the study.
The information spat at us is “wrapped in convincing AI language,” Naaman said, and the advantages of the technology are evident. “The bad news is that there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars of investments and interest in trying to push AI into every corner of our lives … and the dangers are being brushed aside.”
It’s going to take more time, Naaman said, to expose all of the risks and know how to rein them in.
AI will create jobs, for sure. It will also eliminate jobs, and it might be coming for mine. So I asked AI for an ending to this column, and here’s what it came up with:
“And that’s the central tension of this world: the promise of efficiency versus the irreplaceable process of being human.”
I think my job is safe — for now.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
