Is AI a blessing or a curse? This is a recurring question that humanity has asked about every technological breakthrough. In prehistoric times fire was considered one such great advance that transformed human survival and dominance over a harsh environment. Did our remote ancestors really pose that same question about fire? We do not know but whenever fire burned them accidentally or destroyed their habitats, we can imagine them wondering whether it was a boon or a bane.
The invention of writing was the second great revolution. It enhanced the accumulation, sharing and preservation of human knowledge to an unprecedented level. However, according to Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story in which an Egyptian king, Thamus, says writing will weaken memory and give people “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”
Then came the printing press, accelerating the dissemination of knowledge across the globe to an even greater degree; yet some great scholars such as Desiderius Erasmus lamented that printers were filling the world with “stupid, ignorant, slanderous, scandalous, raving, irreligious and seditious books.” Harvard historian Ann Blair tells us that the polymath Conrad Gessner echoed this anxiety in 1545 when he complained that the press had triggered a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” If the printing press provoked such alarm, imagine how much more relevant those concerns are in the age of AI.
The printing press was followed by the Industrial Revolution, which replaced much of human labor with machines. That too caused some consternation and led angry textile workers to smash those very machines. Later, computers and the internet appeared on the scene with the ability to provide instant calculations, information storage, retrieval and communication at breakneck speeds.
The age of computers and the internet fared no better than earlier revolutions as skeptics like Nicholas Carr, an acclaimed American author and cultural critic, loudly asked whether Google was making us stupid. Eventually we largely embraced all of these. And finally at the end of this long chain of technological revolutions, AI emerged. It has naturally raised many similar apprehensions and questions. Should we then embrace it as we did with the earlier ones?
Perhaps, but to my mind the case of AI is substantially different from all other tools we have tinkered with since the dawn of our brief sojourn on earth. Every other invention we have enumerated above (and all others we haven’t) has simplified or accelerated the way we do things but none has attempted to imitate our capacity for thought. What distinguishes AI from everything that preceded it, and what makes it the most alarming tool of our century, is its ability to mimic human thought.
And herein lies its greatest danger to writers. Writing is or should be a product of an author’s innermost thoughts. Authors use their thinking faculties to create ideas, choose words and analyze the thoughts of others. Some writers do produce dull products full of graphs, charts and citations but with relatively little original thought. The goal of such writers is not necessarily originality or depth but rather assembling existing knowledge in a structured way. While not totally devoid of thought, as they still have to interpret data and present conclusions, their main task is cataloging previous information. In other words very little raw or deep thinking is involved.
I have no problem with AI doing much of the work for such writers; in fact AI should take over such tasks provided the author discloses AI use to readers. I also have little objection to AI replacing writers whose work is geared solely toward pleasing readers or who carefully steer away from seemingly controversial topics.
My concern is rather with writers whose work emanates more from the depths of their minds than from research alone. Such writers don’t merely reproduce or mimic the thoughts of others in their own words. They first digest and reflect on those thoughts and then go on to produce their own unique ideas. Such an endeavor requires time, effort and logical thinking. AI is not particularly good at such tasks though it may eventually acquire the skill. If or when it does, it will be a real threat to this unique aspect of human ingenuity we call writing.
Can we then conclude that AI is heralding the end of writing as an honorable profession? It is probably premature to draw such a strong conclusion but the fact that it is becoming increasingly hard to differentiate between human and machine-generated text makes it difficult to rule it out.
The IT industry has produced AI detectors but they are unreliable and prone to errors. OpenAI had to remove its own detector in July 2023 after realizing that it was not accurate enough. Such tools may perform better at detecting text that was exclusively generated by AI but do poorly when evaluating a mix of AI and human-produced text. They particularly fail to detect writing produced by sophisticated writers who can mask AI-generated text by editing it here and there to give it a human touch.
In the age of AI, writers will face two major hurdles. First their writing will struggle to stand out as it may have in the past, because they will be assessed not only against writers of comparable caliber but also against authors at all skill levels who can now use AI to produce high-quality writing in a flash. In effect they will be compared to machine writers as well as human ones.
This will be particularly unfortunate for the new crop of writers, who lack a body of pre-AI work to show, but it will likely affect even those who have been writing for decades before AI, since few will be able to resist the seductive lure of AI. Granted a seasoned writer armed with AI can produce plenty of high-quality material in a fraction of the time it used to take, but so can a mediocre writer who has just begun writing (though to a somewhat lesser degree).
It can thus be said that AI has blurred the line that demarcates great writers from mediocre writers to a significant extent. This is tragic indeed, as it will inevitably lead to suspicion of all writers and written materials; the more brilliantly a piece is composed, the greater the assumption or suspicion that AI has been used. To make matters worse, neither the author nor a critical reader can prove or disprove it. We should also remember that a pre-AI record does not automatically shield us from such suspicion, particularly if our pre- and post-AI writing differs significantly in style and output.
The second hurdle writers face is not knowing whether their writing will ever be read. Readers will have plenty to choose from as written materials have proliferated to an unprecedented level thanks to AI. In addition to this phenomenal increase in all sorts of written materials, AI is also paving the way to new forms of plagiarism and dishonesty.
Plagiarism and cheating, which were already high due to the internet and Google, are skyrocketing in the age of AI. Schools and academia see no way of preventing it. AI can write a school essay and the teacher has no way of detecting it. AI can solve complex math word problems and the teacher cannot catch it. It is horrors upon horrors in the classroom.
Cheating has become so prevalent that many teachers are now requiring students to use physical pen and paper for major assignments, essay writing and exams. They are also increasingly mandating face-to-face oral exams and presentations where students are expected to demonstrate that they truly understand the material.
If you feel a twinge of guilt every time you generate text with AI without disclosing the fact to your readers, congratulations. It means you have a healthy conscience and you should listen to it. So is submitting AI-generated text wholesale without disclosure unethical and comparable to plagiarism? I think so. If plagiarism is copying someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as your own, then the answer would be yes because we are copying AI’s work or ideas and passing them off as our own.
How about us, Awate writers? How should we interact with AI, the elephant in our room? Should we use it to write our articles for us or should we avoid it altogether? I have already denounced the former except as noted below. As for the latter I consider it impractical in the long run. I think the answer depends on the kind of writing.
If an article is mostly a collection of data or information, I see no harm in letting AI handle most of the work, as it excels at organizing and synthesizing data. Nonetheless we must disclose our use of AI to our readers while keeping in mind that AI makes mistakes and that the ultimate responsibility rests with us.
If on the other hand an article primarily deals with reasoning, reflecting and analysis at a deeper level, we should scrupulously avoid using AI except to spot typos, grammatical errors and the like but even then the fixes should be ours. In other words the use should be very minimal. If our AI use remains within such minimal boundaries, no disclosure is needed just as we never had to in our pre-AI writing for using a spell checker or grammar checker. What I hope not to see on Awate is a flood of articles generated by AI but claimed as our own without disclosure.
This is not to deny AI’s tremendous usefulness. Indeed it is like a genie that grants wishes instantaneously. Writers can prompt it with a topic and tell it to write a 3-page article and it can produce a well-crafted draft in minutes though it may lack originality and depth. Equipped with AI, a writer can even submit 10 such articles in one day. Many are also coming to regard it as a kind of oracle. However, the remarkable power of AI is not the focus of this article. Here we are concerned more with what we may be giving up in exchange for this awesome power.
But in the end we must resign ourselves to the fact that the train has left the station and that eventually almost everyone will use AI. Pandora’s box is fully open and, ready or not, AI is here to stay with all its benefits and risks. Among its greatest evils is that it has made truth increasingly difficult to discern.
We can no longer fully trust our senses nor can we insist as we once did that something is real because “we saw it with our own two eyes,” since AI can create authentic-looking images and real-sounding videos. This creates splendid opportunities for crooks and cybercriminals of all types, who can now exploit AI to make their deceptions ever more convincing and harder to detect.
In the foregoing paragraphs we discussed how AI may be usurping or at least imitating our capacity to think and our unique ingenuity. In addition to the potential demise of writing as an honorable profession, an even greater danger looms ahead. According to some futurists and experts in the field, AI will not only take over various human roles but may cause the extinction of Homo sapiens itself! Believe it or not some are even suggesting that AI could be a tool of the Antichrist!
A fitting end? I don’t know but according to the Bible God regretted creating the human race, and according to the Quran the angels questioned Allah when He announced the creation of the first human, asking, “Will You place upon it [earth] one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood?”
Human history proved them right and this reminds me of my favorite Shakespeare quote from Measure for Measure:
“But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.”
Alas, after destroying much of our habitat, killing one another for millennia and coming perilously close to mutual annihilation with the invention of nuclear bombs, will we ultimately be destroyed by machines our own hands have wrought? We have repeatedly proven that we are extraordinarily crafty and clever at building sophisticated toys, but are we utter fools in the art of sensible living or in the preservation of our species?
Will the angels laugh or weep at humanity’s folly? Are we in reality no better than an “angry ape” of Shakespeare’s colorful metaphor and devoid of “true wisdom” as King Thamus put it?
