Brad Littlejohn: The slippery slope of AI

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 13th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. World Opinions Commentator Brad Littlejohn now on the false promises of artificial intelligence.

BRAD LITTLEJOHN: If you watched the Olympics this year, chances are you noticed the steady parade of strikingly tone-deaf AI advertisements filling the commercial breaks. One, for Google’s Gemini, features a young girl striving to imitate her idol, track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. In a voice-over, her father says that she “wants to show Sydney some love,” and asks Gemini to write a fan letter to the Olympic hurdling champion. The ad soon went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Media scholar Shelly Palmer writes, “I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising. I want to live in a culturally diverse world where billions of individuals use AI to amplify their human skills, not in a world where we are used by AI pretending to be human.”

Other AI ads, however, were only slightly less overt in their anti-humanism. In a Microsoft Copilot ad, an employee realizes he hasn’t adequately prepared for an important work meeting. He quickly pulls up Copilot and asks the software to summarize 150 pages worth of material into key points for his presentation. His face lights up as he imagines wowing his co-workers with the snazzy charts and slides.

It’s not hard to believe that many of us, in such a pinch, might ask technology to help bail us out. What beggars believe, however, is that any of us should feel proud of it. Indeed, in many pursuits, the pride we feel in an achievement is directly proportional to the amount of blood, tears, toil, and sweat it took to get there. Riding a ski lift may give you the same breathtaking views as scaling a mountaintop on foot, but chances are the latter will provide far richer and more lasting memories. In some pursuits, we recognize that taking shortcuts isn’t just lame; it should be a source of shame.

Besides, we used to have a word for having someone else write a presentation for you and passing it off as your own: cheating.

The problem is that although we may know better, when it comes to action we tend to follow the path of least resistance. AI can be a very powerful tool, doing hours worth of mind-numbing grunt work in seconds so we can focus on higher-level thinking, creating, and communicating. But it can be tempting to let it start doing that for us as well. We begin by letting the AI correct our spelling, and soon find ourselves letting it draft entire emails. What begins as a supplement can quickly become a substitute, if we’re not careful.

It is particularly ironic that ads about such technology should fill the airwaves in between showcases of real human beings pulling off truly astonishing feats of real human achievement at the Olympic Games. When we discover that some record-breaking swim or jump was fueled by artificial performance enhancers, we are rightly scandalized. How much more so if we discovered the swimmer wasn’t human at all! “But why?” the AI enthusiasts might ask. “If it’s amazing to watch someone long jump 30 feet, wouldn’t it be even cooler to have a world where robotically-assisted athletes jumped 50 feet?” Google’s marketing team might think so, but the rest of us know better.

I’m Brad Littlejohn.

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