By Elizabeth MacMullin
AI will not kill us as you might think; it won’t come for you in the form of a robot wielding a knife, aiming for your heart. Instead, it will go for your mind, until it’s nothing more than a large piece of matter in your skull. A mental death, one could call it. Which, in my opinion, is far worse than any physical death could provide.
Sure, metal beings holding weapons may be more frightening, but one could also argue that a slow decline in knowledge and intelligence is also quite the scare, because it happens so gradually that a person doesn’t notice. Exactly how long would it take for a mental reckoning to commence? That is still unknown, but I think it’s closer than you might think.
With the rise in generative AI, creating something is easier than ever. Want an essay for school? You got it. Want to make yourself into an anime character? Just press send. Anybody can have whatever they want, whenever they want, on just a moment’s notice — which doesn’t only affect their ability to create, but also their ability to wait. Creating is more than something you do in art class; it’s also the backbone of society. I make such a claim because creating art and creating ideas are the same thing. Society would not have been able to evolve without people thinking of solutions to problems and using creative visions to make those solutions a reality.
Almost every object you see in a day was created because there was a problem that needed to be solved. Horses and your legs are both good modes of transportation, but one thing that unites those two together is that they’re both living things, and living things get tired. A person can only walk so far, and a horse can only gallop for so long. The solution to that problem? A car, a metal machine that never gets tired, except in the sense of refuelling and keeping up maintenance. The idea of a car came from many ideas before it, like the horse-drawn carriage, and those ideas eventually evolved into the car. The point being is that everyone creates because everyone thinks; if thinking were to cease, no new ideas would come, and humans could no longer evolve as we have for decades.
Generative AI has the capacity to singlehandedly wipe creativity and ingenuity from the earth, along with taking jobs away from millions and ripping society’s intelligence away from the people. The mental reckoning is closer than one might think. The more a person uses generative AI, the more they rely on an outside source to do their work for them, and the longer they use it, the more they become dependent on it —Until one day they cannot think for themselves and will listen to whatever the AI spews.
Having the ability to imagine and create is something you must not take for granted; it’s a privilege to be able to think independently of a machine. It’s a privilege not to have to rely on something else to do work for you. It’s a privilege to be able to make mistakes, to think for yourself.
It’s a privilege to be human.
