AI – What it is, What it Isn’t

       AI tools and services have become a permanent, and often sensationalized, part of daily life, at home, work, and school. Much and more has been made of AI, and there’s some very real stuff behind the hype – and a lot that isn’t. The media giant Warner Brothers thought they could replace their animators and writers with AI.

       It’s not going well. Microsoft and Google instead leveraged AI to enhance their services and systems, from search results to Windows features, with excellent, if sometimes mixed results. So what gives?

       In order to illustrate AI and its limitations, I need to briefly illustrate computers. Not to worry, this won’t become an article on computer science.

       We’re all familiar with the humble and ubiquitous light switch. They allow electricity to flow from a power source to a bulb, or stop it, just like the valve on a sink lets water flow. If we get more than one light switch, and wire them together properly, we can start processing logic!

      Here we can see that with combinations of switches, we can start processing logic! If we combine billions of them into as small a space as possible using exotic materials and processes, we get a modern CPU, and a pretty rainbow!

      As impressive as this is, and glossing right over the remarkable achievements involved, this shows us the fundamental limitation of any software, including AI; it’s binary. Once instructions get broken down into flicking billions of switches in combination, we’re stuck with combinations of on or off, ones and zeroes. Computers can’t think or feel. A single human brain, by contrast, puts the entire world’s combined electronic computing power to shame in every category but processing speed.

     Computers cannot associate emotion or personal experiences with one another, or with stored data. They can’t process in parallel, make interpretations or judgements, create or invent. They cannot express, or reason. What computers can do, however, is process a staggering volume of calculations as fast as you can move electrons around. What tech companies and the media are currently referring to as AI is anything but. True artificial intelligence, a la Data from Star Trek, Cortana from Halo, or HAL-9000 from Space Odyssey remain the exclusive domain of science fiction.

      So what, really, are the AIs being marketed, sensationalized, disrupting work, education, and large corporations for better and worse? They’re sophisticated database algorithms. They rapidly sort through a given set of data and assign varying “weights,” or values, to what it expects to be in proximity. It builds digital associations – think of all the potential adjectives you might assign to a housecat, assign a value of 1-10 for each one, with a value of 10 for those that describe every cat, and a value of 1 that describes unique cats. Mammal: 10, cute:9, male:5, female:5, orange:4, tux:4, calico:4, heterochromatic eyes: 1, you get the idea.

     Congratulations, you’re now better versed in AI than most people being paid to talk about it on TV! It’s reductive, but AI is essentially just a new take on an old technology, with some added features. What makes it interesting as a technology is all under the hood; for most people, it’s just a really powerful filing cabinet.

      With that out of the way, we arrive at the point. AI, such as it is now, is absolutely terrible when used to create or invent. AI can write a corporate email or newsletter blurb because that invention has already been done, and there’s no expression, no individuality, nothing that we would associate with art that even can go into such things.
       For a salient example, compare the works of Eminem with the AI versions of him on YouTube. Whether you enjoy it or not, his music is expressive, unique, and creative, while the computer-generated versions just string words together in a way that more or less makes sense. To put it another way, the work of people exists in the context of who they are, what they’ve been through, their unique personal challenges and growth, their thoughts and feelings, their judgements, their uniqueness; all that came before. AI content falls out of a coconut tree. Additionally, AI-generated content tends to max out at a roughly 8th grade level.

       So, now that I’ve spent two and half pages deriding AI, I’d like to draw attention to what it does well, with some examples of how I’ve used it.

       The very thing that makes AI unable to invent or create is exactly what makes it useful when leveraged properly. It has a decent system of determining what belongs next to other things, whether it be in writing or art – even if it can’t handle drawing hands. It can help you parse and adjust content that you’ve already made with a much greater proficiency than it can generate. It can parse content with a functional bias of zero, rearrange the order of paragraphs or sentences for better effect or flow, inform you that a passage is extremely reliant on extant and acknowledged information in an audience, and so on.

      AI can tell you what you can remove without losing information, but it can’t make a judgement call about impact because it cannot feel. AI can tell you that you should rearrange the structure of your writing to be in closer proximity to known successful examples of persuasive writing or widely-acclaimed works of fiction, but it won’t really ever understand why, or be able to tell you, other than parroting and paraphrasing the written opinions of critics or myriad essays and articles discussing them. AI cannot create, but it can sometimes act as a decent editor.
       I’ve used AI to trim writing when a two page writing assignment turned into six, as true to my compsci background, my idea of making apple pie starts with creating the universe.

     I’ve used it to make my writing less repetitive in places. I’ve used it to make my writing seem less ostentatious, lest my tendency toward sesquipedalian loquaciousness distemper my audience or leave an unintended impression as a pontifical and pompatic, because many of my attempts to express myself with absolute clarity can come across as grandisonant. I did a lot of dictionary copying punishments as a kid, and sometimes the resultant vocabulary appears elitist.

     Above all else, using AI tools has helped me not only manage ADD/ADHD symptoms, but leverage them as advantages.

     When this is your reality, having a wall to throw spaghetti against can be a tremendous benefit, even life altering. While a truly comprehensive solution doesn’t yet exist, I can easily ask Google’s Gemini to set schedules and tasks, take notes with Rocketbook, snap a picture of those notes from my phone to upload to Evernote or OneNote with OCR, and use one of a few AI suites intended for enterprise and corporate project management to centralize all of these, add or remove links or associations at the speed of thought, and use AI to parse, scan, and interact with all of them to keep it all in one place, automagically organized, indexed, and formatted. Any organizational tool that requires a routine of tedium to make use of is a non-starter for the neurodivergent, and while a kludge solution, it works exceedingly well for me.

       That covers the pragmatic and practical, but there’s serious ethical conversations that need to be had about the use of AI. It’s never acceptable to pass off someone else’s work as your own, for reasons I hope don’t require explanation. The fact that AI output tends to be at a pre-high school level should serve as enough discouragement in a collegiate course, but beyond that, writing is a lot more than a useful tool.

       The written word is, or can be, an art form unto itself. Writing has always been my preferred means of expressing myself, and was formative in how I explored the world growing up. Works of fiction inspired growth and helped me navigate the world in ways I’d have been otherwise unprepared for, while non-fiction helped me understand the nuts and bolts and satisfied curiosity. Writing is so much more than a tool of record.

       Writing can, and has, started and ended wars, inspired individuals to growth and greatness, helped people understand and navigate the world and relationships, sparked political, cultural, and economic revolutions, formed the basis of legal and civic systems, defended and secured the rights and dignity of those most at risk of losing them – even as its also used to attack them. We rely on it to stay informed of world events, to increase our pool of knowledge, explore and test ideas, and for two generations and counting used to form new relationships and ideas, compare and test ideals, to share our thoughts with the world and express ourselves. Every good and ill you can assign to the internet is really an association with the written word, the internet simply serves as a means to convey it.

       Every single piece of media you consume, from modern games to content on social media and alternative media platforms, to those who craft the laws that govern your life, rights, and opportunity rely on the written word to do so. It’s impossible to understate the importance of writing, and therefore, how important it is to challenge one’s own writing and critical analysis skills.

      AI can accomplish none of this on its own, but it can serve to help enhance what you create, or overcome hurdles and challenges in writing. Text-based communication has never been more ubiquitous. Strong writing skills are no longer simply a good thing to have in your toolbox, but I’d argue have become an absolute requirement to modern life.            

     As such, using AI to generate writing on your behalf, on top of being a lie, robs you of some of the most precious gifts of humanity – that of self expression, of challenge and improvement, of growth and development, and in some cases, even the ability to defend yourself or others, of the very ability to learn and explore on your own. Invention and creativity, in addition to everything above are skills, precious and perishable ones, and relying on AI to employ them for you can have a degenerative effect on those abilities. The brain is similar to muscles or PTO in that regard; use it or lose it.

     It’s important to remember that a grade in a class does not define you nor your abilities. Grading systems exist to assess competency of academic material, and identify your relevant strengths and weaknesses. I didn’t pay hundreds of dollars (and that’s on the extremely affordable end compared to private universities) to leave less able than I entered, and neither did anyone’s parents. Avoid tying your sense of security to your grades, and watch the temptation to cheat give way to the desire and ability to earn it yourself, and be better off for it. AI can serve to enhance your creativity, but never to replace it – it simply lacks the ability.