by Peter A. Arthur-Smith

“One year in and ChatGPT already has us doing its bidding.” Article by Vauhini Vara, New York Times Opinion section, December 2023

Have you experienced frustration lately, while texting or emailing, at the constant corrections to your latest messaging? It’s as if you have your grammar teacher constantly overlooking your shoulder and revising your verbal output.  Whatever you write has to be text-book perfect, otherwise you shouldn’t transmit it at all. Have you thought that, if we succumb to this impertinence, then your message receivers will have no idea if your prose is authentic or machine generated?

With your natural imperfect flourishes, your recipients will likely definitely know that you’re the author rather than a machine. That’s why I often overrule AI and leave my original prose as is. It’s frustrating to keep going back and correcting your original intent in the first place.  Not that it’s all bad to have your spelling errors modified or questioned. But when you’re differentiating between an American Mom and a British Mum, it can be tiresome to trick your AI program into accepting the difference! Often it doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.” Goodbye authenticity, goodbye intimate flourishes, goodbye a speedy ungrammatical note!

It can be tiresome to retain your personal flourishes against AI’s constant desire to impress you. At what point are we heading for a sterile, impersonal and non-creative world just to satisfy the “masters” behind ChatGPT and other AI providers? Did you know that they’re on a hiring spree to hire English majors so they can sit back and shine against your illiteracy?

The quoted article author, Vara, out of frustration with the many errors she picked up on AI’s answers to questions on her bio, made two key points worth thinking deeply about:

• “…the power imbalance between AI creators and its users should make us worry about its insidious reach.”
• “Today, when the technology is in its infancy, that power seems novel, even funny. Tomorrow it might not.”

Although that particular New York Times and other journal articles have reported the increased lawmaker willingness to step-in – notably in Europe, where personal privacy and authenticity are even more sacred – more members of Congress and the Senate need to weigh-in more aggressively on this critical, fast-moving issue. That may not be easy, since these cash rich entities are a lure for politicians seeking to fund their next expensive, re-election campaigns. Their remit should include safeguards for personal and commercial intellectual property that the AI ventures want to vacuum up to feed their AI machine protégés.

Take two other technology sisters to AI that also sound alarm bells:

» Your car is another moving target.  My wife recently received an email brief from  her leasing company proudly presenting its delight in sharing how much mileage she had done, how much fuel she had used, and where she had parked. Do we need this screening on everything we do with our cars? It can hit the pit of your stomach to know that your driving habits are being monitored. Also, that your leasing company might eventually refuse future leases because it doesn’t like how much fuel you use!

» Another car related article in a December 2023 New York Times by Kashmir Hill entitled ‘The Stalker Under your Hood,’ was subtitled, ‘ Apps that remotely track and control cars are being weaponized by abusive partners.’ It went on to describe how a woman, who broke-off living with her abusive husband, was being monitored by that unwelcome husband on where she went and by default who she was associating with. She couldn’t break away from him, while the car company concerned was under no obligation to do anything about it.

It’s only a matter of time before these data scenarios are directly linked with AI, too. Such scenarios may be like music in a police state, but, in a society that trumpets its freedoms, it is, in fact, being hoodwinked by “big brother.” It would seem instead that we’ve all become celebrities, who are constantly trying to evade the paparazzi. We are increasingly being followed wherever we go, which includes the preponderance of street cameras. Again, all this is digitized and will be ultimately fed into AI systems for public, or otherwise, use. Politicians may welcome being in the limelight, although the majority of their less narcissistic citizens don’t.

Again, our lawmakers need to step-up the pace, as they’re beginning to in Europe, before it’s too late. They need to resist the self-serving overtures from the technology companies and find a sensible balance between AI’s virtues and its dark-side before the point of no return. They should resist being financially feted by the self-interested technology companies that thrive on soft-target products – that feed-off privacy issues – and focus instead on more challenging real-value products related to health and well-being.

If you feel the same way, reach out to your lawmakers right away and challenge them to make early, dramatic changes.  Right now it’s like the Wild West, when it comes to AI and technology creep! Lawmakers are there to make a difference and put our minds at rest.