Man vs. Machine

All my posts are 100% AI-free. Not because I’m anti-AI, but because when I write, it’s just me and my thoughts. I don’t need an AI to muddy those thoughts.

Of course my thoughts are muddied all the time. When I’m reading a post written by someone else, what I’m reading is the linguistic expression of their thought. Thoughts that I then have to integrate into my own, or reject if my biases are too strong.

But that’s exactly the problem with AI, isn’t it? If I read something written by an AI, I’m not reading anyone’s thoughts. It’s not even conscious thought at all. It’s a statistical approximation of what thought may look like when expressed through language. I don’t like reading AI-written articles myself, so I also won’t insult my readers with the contempt that is implied when we don’t even take the time to put conscious thought into what we write for them.

Sure, I may use AI during my research. In many ways it’s better than a search engine surely. But like a search engine, it doesn’t inherently “know” anything. It can point us to resources, it can summarise them, and it can even make somewhat intelligent inferences from them. I’m not a naysayer who claims that emergent intelligence is not a thing. But I am a naysayer who says that emergent consciousness is not a thing. Because materialism is an illusion, and a material computer cannot know anything in a conscious capacity. Its intelligence is not grounded in experience or self-awareness.

That doesn’t mean it’s worthless. AI output is good enough for computers, in some forms of programming. And in general, when time is equated with money, and the risk of mistakes is deemed acceptable, it can be good for business too. But when we’re writing for human consumption, and when this consumption is intellectual in nature, we need to let the humans write it. Because if we don’t, we are not only denying the value of consciousness, we are eroding it.