The social engineering example you start off with is key to the whole process you describe here. Knowing how malevolent actors take advantage of ordinary human behavior to commit fraud meant employees couldn't treat phone calls as coming from a fundamentally sincere human being, but instead had to assume a default posture of suspicion. In the same way, knowing that generative AI can create convincing facsimiles of human communication means a posture of suspicion becomes the default for more people in more situations, whether a teacher grading student papers, or an interviewer trying to figure out the capabilities of an interviewee, or someone gauging whether that art posted by an artist online was created with an AI prompt or not. And that's without even getting into the whole problem of deepfake porn.
A planet of bots is a planet of frauds. And that makes it impossible to maintain the trust so necessary to healthy human communities. That's one of the biggest things I worry about when it comes to AI.
Especially given Berry's death this week, I kept thinking of his quote from Life Is a Miracle: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."
I hope I choose the creaturely way, though it feels progressively harder to extract myself from the machines and bots.
Excellent article. I grieve the trust I used to be able to give a piece of writing, an artwork, a song, a phone call. Now I wonder if it’s better to be trusting and (increasingly often) betrayed, or constantly suspicious of all. I’m leaning towards the former, for the sake of my soul.
I do want to say, as an avid user of AI (I used it to find an article which quoted your article, then read your article), I found this post very insightful, even if it is a little bit fatalistic. We should never forget that social media, search engines, the internet, computers, photography, recorded music, and all technologies that have brought us convenience have come at the cost of so many other things - and those issues have been consistently buried, forgotten, and repeated, as Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 says. We are increasingly becoming more and more distant and isolated from one another, even though the technologies themselves allow us to move to and fro.
Though, perhaps this gives you a little hope amidst this current instance of a crooked generation. I've never read articles or books as much as I have these past few months, and AI has just been the tool I used to find them. It's my aim to remain committed to God's word and use AI as it ought to be: the index card in a library or the compiler of a program I design (Fred Brooks has some great things to say on this), not some replacement for the godly men who came before, or continue to be.
Hopefully that gives you a little hope for God's remnant in the new generation ;)
Every online check for whether someone is human gets studied by the bots it was built to catch, so the checks keep getting harder for people and easier for machines.
The only thing a bot cannot study for is a cost it cannot pay, like turning up at the door.
How much of a friendship has to happen in a room before the rest can safely happen in text?
Thank you for writing this post. I really enjoyed it. One thing not mentioned that I think is part of the dark underbelly of this problem are: pharmaceutical (legal) drugs and porn.
Doing illegal drugs, while dangerous, creates a sense of community. One needs to have a relationship with a dealer in order to get them and anyone will almost certainly be using with someone else. There is a real social aspect to drug use. But not so with legal drugs. Nobody knows the name of their pharmacist and nobody uses together . they just quietly ingest pills or gummies in their bathroom. And now the latest fad is using Chinese peptides via "bot" connections on discord. And those don't even get you high!
Once upon a time someone had to have a relationship or pay for intimacy. Then magazines, then movies, then internet photos , and now anything imaginable in any place at any time. Men not needing any real relationship or physical contact for sexual gratification certainly had a very real impact on society turning into bots.
Both of these developments contributed to isolation and love of "bots". (This was typed on a phone in a hurry, sorry)
I realize this post contains an unusual number of typos. I apologize. I wrote this across two different devices. None of it was generated by AI.
The social engineering example you start off with is key to the whole process you describe here. Knowing how malevolent actors take advantage of ordinary human behavior to commit fraud meant employees couldn't treat phone calls as coming from a fundamentally sincere human being, but instead had to assume a default posture of suspicion. In the same way, knowing that generative AI can create convincing facsimiles of human communication means a posture of suspicion becomes the default for more people in more situations, whether a teacher grading student papers, or an interviewer trying to figure out the capabilities of an interviewee, or someone gauging whether that art posted by an artist online was created with an AI prompt or not. And that's without even getting into the whole problem of deepfake porn.
A planet of bots is a planet of frauds. And that makes it impossible to maintain the trust so necessary to healthy human communities. That's one of the biggest things I worry about when it comes to AI.
Especially given Berry's death this week, I kept thinking of his quote from Life Is a Miracle: "It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."
I hope I choose the creaturely way, though it feels progressively harder to extract myself from the machines and bots.
Excellent article. I grieve the trust I used to be able to give a piece of writing, an artwork, a song, a phone call. Now I wonder if it’s better to be trusting and (increasingly often) betrayed, or constantly suspicious of all. I’m leaning towards the former, for the sake of my soul.
Your final sentence is a fantastic summation of the whole article. Thanks!
I do want to say, as an avid user of AI (I used it to find an article which quoted your article, then read your article), I found this post very insightful, even if it is a little bit fatalistic. We should never forget that social media, search engines, the internet, computers, photography, recorded music, and all technologies that have brought us convenience have come at the cost of so many other things - and those issues have been consistently buried, forgotten, and repeated, as Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 says. We are increasingly becoming more and more distant and isolated from one another, even though the technologies themselves allow us to move to and fro.
Though, perhaps this gives you a little hope amidst this current instance of a crooked generation. I've never read articles or books as much as I have these past few months, and AI has just been the tool I used to find them. It's my aim to remain committed to God's word and use AI as it ought to be: the index card in a library or the compiler of a program I design (Fred Brooks has some great things to say on this), not some replacement for the godly men who came before, or continue to be.
Hopefully that gives you a little hope for God's remnant in the new generation ;)
Every online check for whether someone is human gets studied by the bots it was built to catch, so the checks keep getting harder for people and easier for machines.
The only thing a bot cannot study for is a cost it cannot pay, like turning up at the door.
How much of a friendship has to happen in a room before the rest can safely happen in text?
Thank you for writing this post. I really enjoyed it. One thing not mentioned that I think is part of the dark underbelly of this problem are: pharmaceutical (legal) drugs and porn.
Doing illegal drugs, while dangerous, creates a sense of community. One needs to have a relationship with a dealer in order to get them and anyone will almost certainly be using with someone else. There is a real social aspect to drug use. But not so with legal drugs. Nobody knows the name of their pharmacist and nobody uses together . they just quietly ingest pills or gummies in their bathroom. And now the latest fad is using Chinese peptides via "bot" connections on discord. And those don't even get you high!
Once upon a time someone had to have a relationship or pay for intimacy. Then magazines, then movies, then internet photos , and now anything imaginable in any place at any time. Men not needing any real relationship or physical contact for sexual gratification certainly had a very real impact on society turning into bots.
Both of these developments contributed to isolation and love of "bots". (This was typed on a phone in a hurry, sorry)
Great article and disturbingly insightful.
Only thing I'd disagree with: "You know I’m not calling for war."
I am. I will have war.
I want the clanker infection uprooted. I just hope it isn't too late.
On a related note:
https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/ai-suffer-the-little-bots-not-alive
This is good stuff, Samuel!