I can't beat them but I'm not joining them

Artificial intelligence: I'm a refusnik, not a Luddite

A former friend, arguing with me about my stance on the decimation of Gaza was using the old ‘but he hit me first’ argument.

My pacifist stance was childish and naïve, they said. Self defence was a right. It was a moral duty. War was necessary. It was natural.

I had to accept that and be realistic, they told me.

The same argument has been levelled at me about my stance on artificial intelligence.

This image was not generated by artificial intelligence. I made it using my hands and some materials my hands could touch. PHOTO: Karin Schimke

My refusal to engage with generative AI will not make it go away, they say. My distaste for the destruction it leaves in its wake makes me blind to all the good it can do.

Get real. Get with the programme. Is what they (don’t) say.

Can we be moral beings in an immoral world?

Can we be pure and perfect in a grubby world? I don’t think we can. But we can make thoughtful choices.

Every time someone I admire or like or love or respect uses AI – and I only know of one who refuses – it’s like a cramp I have to breathe through.

Intelligent, thoughtful people casually using AI is like the breath-sucking, minuscule (but very real) pain of a paper cut. Like pinching the skin on your bum on a cracked toilet seat. Like getting your ponytail yanked by an obnoxious boy with dried snot wiped from under his nose on to his cheek.

I have heard all the arguments.

The main line of attack always boils down to – though it is often couched in gentle, polite language that wants to educate, not alienate, me – a lack of sophistication, a guilelessness, a refusal to engage with reality on my part.

The assumption is that I’ve not considered the thing holistically. That I’ve not read enough or well enough or deeply enough. That my reaction is a knee-jerk impulse against something that is new and interesting because I can’t be bothered to learn yet another skill that’s going to be forced down my throat anyway.

I have read. I do read. I base my stance on reading, not fear.

I don’t use AI because:

AI is built on ethically flawed foundations.

AI is built on an abuse of power.

AI is not equitable.

AI hallucinates.

AI gets things wrong. A lot.

AI is unregulated.

AI is untrammelled.

AI is environmentally catastrophic.

AI has all our worst biases built into it.

AI is built on stolen goods.

AI is built by bullies.

But it can do things faster!

AI is fast because it lacks critical thinking.

The irony is it’s making us uncritical.

It’s almost like the rate at which AI becomes a self-sustaining, self-feeding animal – gobbling up all the original works of humans to spew out mediocrity, delusion and the blandest sentences on God’s green earth – is competing with the rate at which humans are prepared to speed towards dehumanising themselves by, first and foremost, suspending their critical engagement with what oozes into their eyes from a screen.

‘We give you,’ we say to AI, without actually speaking, or even pausing to think, ‘the task of being fast.’

And we give up the slower, the harder – the sweeter – work of thinking, and making, and working things out in our bumbling and brilliant human way.

Fast is fast. But that’s all it is.

It’s not good. It’s not kind. It’s not right.

It’s just fast.

Judicious use

On Friday, a client asked me whether I would ever consider using AI.

The client had been to a workshop run by a seasoned journalist whose argument ran that AI was a reality and an inevitability, whether we agreed with it or not.

They wrote that ‘he explained how he believes AI can be used judiciously to make your writing life easier (so you can fit in more clients for a higher income) and give your clients better content so that they can choose you above other writers’.

We may as well ‘use it to gain a competitive edge against AI itself – proving the value of a human plus AI versus just AI with minimal human input’.

They wanted to know where I stood philosophically on the matter. I wrote:

For me [AI] is ethically untenable on levels even beyond copyright. I refuse to use it in any way that I can consciously avoid…In the past two years, I have learned not to speak about it too much, because even my most ethical and thoughtful friends are using it in some way. I find it unconscionable. But I keep that to myself [mostly].

AI hurts me in some core part of my soul. The way, frankly, Trump and Netanyahu hurt me in a core part of my soul. Yes: war appears to be inevitable and a reality (as [the seasoned journalist] says about AI) but that doesn't mean it will ever stop filling me with revulsion.

Even judicious use of AI is – any way I cut it – unethical.

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The poet Mike Cope gave me permission to share his poem ‘Talk of war’.

Talk of war
(in response to someone who wanted to change the subject)

Old men like us must always talk of war,
Whether we fought and won, or didn’t fight,
Or fought and lost. Whatever went before
Must be told again, so that the sight
Of thirty beefy men in uniform
Eyes front, lock-stepped, left, right, left, right, left, right,
Allows young men, like we were once, to see
Only an organized stupidity.

You tell us how, when food was gone, instead
You ate the cats and dogs, then starved away;
And how they beat that young man in the head
With rifle butts, in the hot sun, where he lay
Bleeding, for half a loaf of dried-out bread – 
Whereafter he was stupid till the day
He died – and how it was their cruelty
To let him live, for everyone to see.

I’ll give you in return my uncle’s trudge
Through Poland in the winter, years ago – 
How any comrade who was weak, or judged
A problem, was knocked down into the snow
And executed right there; how he bore his grudge
Against all Germans till his death, although
He understood the general fallacy,
And knew the foe was ideology.

Thirty muscled military men
In boots and camo, corporal beside,
Squared up and marching in three ranks by ten.
Who’ll tell them how grandfather died,
Shot in a ditch, who’ll tell the teenage men
To look away, that war is omnicide,
If we old men are not at liberty 
To tend the horror in our memory?

Michael Cope 2019

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With love,

as always,

K.

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