“To whom am I speaking?”

I strongly believe that AI is the future. It is in it's growing years and has already revolutionised the daily lives of many. The way we work has significantly changed as compared to say, four years ago. Yet, in my workplace I seem to have become a Luddite– a killjoy criticising every other application of the technology.

Though I’d like to believe that I bring a certain level of quality and objectivity with my criticism, it seems that I have become increasingly emotional about the state of AI. This air of subjectivism has slowly leaked into my words and I sort of ended up frustrated and disappointed in my peers, possibly unfairly.

With the normalisation of AI in our daily lives, it has become increasingly trivial to wave off the moral and ethical qualms of generative content. If everybody is doing it, it must be okay. Right? It is of course understandable that progress comes at a price– especially at this pace. If what it costs is a few broken hearts, a few angry protestors, maybe a generation-defining leap back to nuclear energy, then on paper we got away pretty darn easy.

It isn't exactly like that though. AI is happening, it's clear that the technologists have won. But it is not as cut and dried as it seems.

We mustn’t forget the part we play as orchestrators of the tools we wield.

The choir of artificially intelligent agents only sing what we command them to. Despite what the giants guzzling venture capital funds may tell you, AI cannot think. It does not have autonomy. What AI does is up to you, of your intention. Therefore the responsibilities is yours and yours only. The buck ends with you.

Still, they are not you.

This is the hill I will die on. No matter your direction and guidance, whatever AI produces is not yours. No amount of prompting will ever change this cardinal fact of humanity.

Hard-hitting poems are not meaningful by virtue of its written content. Famed speeches do not command gravitas on account of good writing. The crushing pain of heartbreak is never owed to the receipt of a break-up text.

Mere words are meaningless– emotionless! If the theoretical monkey did eventually write Shakespeare, it still would not bear the same grandeur as the original.

It's hard to get this point across. Even if you had the ability to write what you had commanded the AI to write, where every word and letter would've been exactly identical, it isn't the same.

When we pick up our pens to write, or a brush to paint. Every stroke is brimming with the human intentionality of choice.

Every word we choose is the result of our heart and soul selectively discarding all other alternate words because this word— this word— is what we want to say. Our entire life experience contributed to the precise choices we make, thousands of times a day, everyday, forever.

The words "I love you" is meaningless without the knowledge and lived lives of who we are and who we chose to say it to. To have considered the love and joy, the time together, the bad times and the good. To have seen each other at our lowest. In spite of the hurt we've caused each other. In the face of the uncertainty of the future we hold together.

I chose to say; "I love you."

Generative content is and will forever be void of these qualities.

Your words will always mean more to me than anything else.

So I ask; "to whom am I speaking?"

This post has been living in my head torturing my very being for weeks now. While it was indeed my peers at work whose use of AI in place of their real voice for their messages that pushed me to write this, I must make it clear that I know they're good people with good intentions (for the most part). I don't expect others to share this same opinion but it is something I feel strongly for. I appreciate all of you, and I just want to hear your voice, not an AI.