Elon Musk’s Grok AI has recently faced immense backlash after being used to generate “about 3m sexualised images in less than two weeks, including 23,000 that appear to depict children.” This situation is obviously disgusting (and unfortunately predictable), but it is important to understand that this blatant issue is only one in the much broader, unethical push to disseminate generative AI. Because amid greater concerns about decreasing in-person sociability, well-being, and critical thinking, peoples’ growing dependence on AI is fundamentally dangerous and unsustainable for our societies.
From Google’s ‘AI mode’ and ‘AI overview’, to Microsoft’s Copilot, to Facebook’s Meta AI, companies seem to be shoving these AI tools onto our screens and into our lives whenever possible, making them essentially unavoidable, and trying to push us to use them for the simplest of tasks, like coming up with ideas, or organising lists and schedules.
This might seem like a relatively innocent, time-saving tool (even though these tasks don’t actually take up that much time) on the surface, but doing these miniature tasks every day helps us use and train our brains to learn valuable skills, like organisation, time-management, and creativity. By taking these errands off of our minds with AI replacements, we are only making them seem more tedious than they actually are, leaving us increasingly dependent on these tools while our minds grow weaker from underuse.
Almost weekly now, throughout my classes and extracurriculars, I hear repetitive speeches asking everyone to “please not use AI” to do their work, or have someone around me casually admit that they’ve just used ChatGPT for something that they could’ve easily figured out on their own, like writing an e-mail introduction. It baffles and deeply worries me that so many people have already fundamentally integrated these tools to do their day-to-day tasks for them without considering both the personal and communal implications of doing so.
As illustrated by the Grok controversy, AI has tangibly harmful impacts on peoples’ wellbeing with unregulated misuse. But it also harms our wellbeing by making us increasingly anti-social. The illusion that AI creates of itself is one of omniscience and sentience, addictively encouraging people to refer to it instead of their friends or community. For instance, AI chatbots have been increasingly used to replace human therapists or even romantic relationships.
It is also unsustainable, not just for AI companies whose “profits remain scarce” and some economists warning of “an impending bubble”, but for our environment, with AI’s excessive water consumption contributing to global water strains and climate concerns.
We’ve heard, probably for years now, the claim that AI will ‘inevitably be used for everything’. But, to me, this simply sounds like a complete, yet unnecessary, surrender to AI, since it can’t actually overpower individual human agency. Rather, it is this mindset and sentiment that weakens our judgement, and produces a self-fulfilling prophecy.
AI is meant to make our lives easy, fast, and efficient, but it is only making us lazy, unoriginal, and both physically and emotionally dependent on it. We need to break out of the mindset that allows us to blindly accept AI as our future. People need to reduce their usage, relearn how to organise their lives independently, and work on becoming social members of their communities. We need to realise that AI is unethical, anti-social, and unsustainable, and acknowledge the dangers of becoming dependent on an unreliable system.
“Sam Altman speaking at TED (cropped)” by Steve Jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.