Will AI cost more than it delivers?

A couple of years ago, legendary British satirist Ricky Gervais quipped that before any government wanted to test the sentiment of the average person in the street, it should take the warnings saying “do not drink” off bleach bottles.

His point was that if the public couldn’t be trusted not to drink bleach, then it shouldn’t be trusted with generation-defining decisions like Brexit, Britain’s unexpected departure from the European Union.

Nothing wrong using ChatGPT

Artificial Intelligence (AI), or more pertinently ChatGPT, is a bit like that.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the use of AI in schools – often by the very people who are increasingly using the technology themselves to cut corners.

Like every technological advancement, from the abacus to the personal computer, there’ll always be Luddites who try to take hammers to it, but it is an incredible tool.

It’s also unstoppable. The question is whether we allow ourselves to work with it, or be subsumed by it.

Increasing numbers of people are using ChatGPT to write. There’s nothing wrong with that.

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In fact, most of us could do with a bit of onboard sub-editing before we hit send.

But equally the laziness that is inherent in so many of us, that stops us from reading WhatsApps before we share them, is the same idleness that makes us satisfied with the first draft the programme spews out.

And therein lies the rub.

If you are prepared to work with ChatGPT or any other platform, intentionally and intimately, you will become a better writer, a better coder.

You could probably even draw up contracts better than your attorney or do your tax returns. But equally it can make you totally useless.

A race to the bottom

We’ve already got studies showing how digital reading has seriously affected the cognitive faculties of those who do not read the old-fashioned way.

Plugging stuff into AI and being satisfied with what comes out can only end one way: a race to the bottom, into the whirlpool around the plug hole before being spewed out down the drain.

We shouldn’t be surprised though.

We’ve long turned our noses up at real work – the crafts, the trades and even manual labour – in favour of the allure of an office and a pen pushing paper around.

That led to thriving immigrant diasporas – and plumbers getting paid more than medical specialists.

AI could cost a lot more than warnings on bleach bottles.

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