Faking it

First off, unless you’re referring to artificial ice for hockey, anything that’s called artificial can never be as good as the real thing. I dislike Artificial Intelligence. There, I’ve declared my views on AI right up front.
After all, AI is attempting to stand in for human thinking. Why does anyone thoughtful want to have anything to do with something that purports to do that? As a writer, I never use AI. If I did, it would be like a house painter giving over his job to the first person who walks by.
I’m told the more you use AI, the better it gets at mimicking you. No thanks. I’d rather do my own research and writing. University profs can usually identify on first reading those essays written using AI. They often come from students who’ve had poor attendance at classes and are trying to shine at the end of term. Such sudden improved performances are suspicious.
Moreover, there are few, if any, footnotes in their essays. The student hasn’t read widely on the topic he or she is writing about. Maybe AI has even generated a mistaken interpretation for them from some source. Worst of all, the student has not done any thinking. Isn’t that what university is all about, learning how to think?
As for mistakes by AI, I’ve heard that AI is getting better over time. It’s learning along the way. Who want’s that kind of stumbling performance in a so-called partner? AI can also be asked to read something and report, but doesn’t always get everything right. Since when didn’t accuracy matter?
What about hospitals and physicians who use AI to diagnose an illness? Would you want your doctor doing that? Or make driving decisions in your self-driven car as you loll in the back seat. Your insurance policy would soon be null and void.
Yet, AI is all around us. There are AI data centres in Canada receiving hundreds of million dollars in government largesse.
But it’s all so mystical. One of the most used forms of AI, for language-based tasks, is ChatGPT. GPT is short for, wait for it, Generative pre-trained transformer. Do you really want anything to do with something as obtuse as that?
I asked GPT if the earth was flat and was told, no, it’s an oblate spheroid. I don’t know about you, but that didn’t help me much.
Know this. This blog post was written without any help from ChatGPT.