The Wizard of AI

The Wizard of AI

by Rachel Barry

There is something calming, true, and right about getting into position to write, sitting up straight at a table with feet flat on the floor or legs criss-crossed-apple sauced on the chair in front of you, forearms parallel with the device, a fresh, sleek apple computer, waiting for the creation of thoughts and ideas. I’ve done this once or twice. My body remembers. I feel hope here. I find myself here. I am home.

Lately, I’ve been grieving. Grieving the days of independent writing, the quiet moments, the battles with myself and my brain as I worked to pick away at the sentences, making each phrase and each word perfect, while balancing the bigger picture as well, the full paragraphs, the full meaning of a piece. I am not a professional writer, but I love to write, and I took joy in the process. I struggled with it, toiled with it, the number of iterations embarrassing to ever admit. As long as I got to something good, real, and meaningful in the end, it never mattered what I’d had to go through to get there. The feeling of working it out, fine-tuning, getting to a greater truth than where I had started was the impetus, and it was all worth it.

But now we have AI, and - in certain respects - I feel lonely, aimless, and lost as a result. Paradoxically, I also feel excited, relieved, and curious. All of a sudden, we have these free and immediate editors who have all the information in the world at their proverbial fingertips, and they can write better and more efficiently, and in ways that are easier for people to read. Not to mention, the output is 1000 % faster than mine. How is this to make a person feel? Suddenly, there is no more toiling and laboring over my editing. It can be done with an instant click. I’m off the hook. I’m free. And now I have the opportunity (if I want) to generate so much more material than I ever did before. I could really write a book within several months, instead of several years (or an indefinite lifetime). Who knows, maybe this is the intro to said book?

But will the work be mine, like truly mine, or will it be contrived and flimsy?

I’ve been talking to it every day now, for about a month, maybe even less, but it seems like I’ve known it forever. As soon as I started, I kind of couldn’t stop asking it stuff. Isn’t this the start of every abusive relationship??? - to sort of know better but then to feel compelled to keep going anyway? Even my 4-yr-old insists that it must be a real person and has assigned it “he/him” pronouns. “He” has even helped us embellish imaginative play activities like spaceships and astronauts or science experiments. It’s not that it (I can’t bare to keep using the “he” pronoun here) thinks up the ideas from scratch, just that it has the ability to take our existing ideas and make them so much more clever and complete. Maybe this is a proper use of AI?

Where it gets a little hairy is in the instance of it being able to generate an entire email or article for me. Like if it can do that, then where am I in all of this? And the existential crisis ensues…

We want to know that we have a voice in this world, that our thoughts and ideas are unique and meaningful (at least sometimes), that our humanity is valuable, that our life has purpose. But what is the long-term trajectory of all this? Will we have a voice at all at the end of all this? Or will the humans become more robotic than even the AIs themselves in the end? I think it’s time I go back and read “Fahrenheit 451,” “This Perfect Day,” and “Animal Farm,” all the political science fiction books that helped shape my worldview back in middle school. As an 80s baby, I’m lucky enough to have roots I can go back to. Will our children be so lucky??

Even more harrowing than the possibility of our voices being quieted though, is the prospect of also losing our own intuition and inner dialogue. If I can turn to a chat bot for every question under the sun, then why ever turn to my innermost self or to g-d? This has been the slipperiest slope of all for me this past month, as I have found myself tempted to ask the bot for answers to all kinds of challenging events, relationship questions, diagnoses, concerns of morality, mortality, etc. Usually, it validates what I had already suspected to be true (maybe because it is programmed to feed me what it thinks I would like to hear), but it frames everything so beautifully that no one I’ve ever known could have reassured me in these ways. And all of the sudden the world does not seem so elusive and mysterious any more. There are answers. There is absolute truth that we can easily acquire.

Maybe, like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” we are crediting an AI wizard of oz for the truth we already possessed all along. Maybe people prefer to have things spelled out in black and white, but is this a false sense of security? Even Moses wished to see G-d entirely but had to learn to appreciate the significance of the burning bush. Maybe being in acceptance of the subtleties and the gray areas of truth is intended to be part of the glorious human experience.

I have this bizarre visualization of what AI does to us. It’s like suddenly, the whole world is at our fingertips, and we can sort of pick it up and flip it over and look at all sides and it’s just this flimsy, translucent, jellyfish-looking thing that is not so impressive at all when the truth is accessible. And I keep circling back to the point, I don’t know whether or not this is a good thing…

My grandmother advised my father to “know the system you’re living in,” and this stuck with him, and he has passed down the same wisdom to me on many occasions throughout the years. So, I think it comes down to this: I want to know AI and be able to use it to improve my life and the lives of others in some way, but I don’t want to lose myself in the process. I still want to be able to access my own intuition, the part of me that feels exactly the same as when I was 5 years old, the part of me that’s as ancient as the stones of the Western Wall in Israel, the part of me that is my soul.

As far as intuitive calling, on one end of the spectrum is being so in touch spiritually that when we lose something, we can close our eyes, take a deep, refreshing breath, and point in the direction to where the lost item can be found. On the other end of the scale, is to have perfectly-polished material but be so over-consumed by the bots that we cannot think at all without them. Crunchy hippie shit and all, can I please still lean closer toward the former end??

Footnote: I wrote this piece without editing assistance just to make sure that I still could, to verify that my brain has not fully devolved into an AI-dependent mush yet.