There are many articles that demonstrate the negative impacts of artificial intelligence on education, and it is a near-accepted fact that artificial intelligence lowers test scores, decreases critical thinking, inhibits reading comprehension and a whole slew of other impacts detrimental to the development of young thinkers. Simply put, artificial intelligence is not a good way to learn, and it is not good for your mind to get accustomed to its use.
Yet the chief issue with AI is not its educational impacts, concerning as they may be. What I find to be most problematic with this new tool is the mere fact that AI is not you.
And you are wonderful.
But what occurs when you submit yourself to AI, as many of us do?
When we automate ourselves out of our own lives, what becomes of us?
We use AI to write emails to professors begging for extensions, explain absences with some vague reference to an “illness” going around, and write out questions we are too fearful, lazy, or stupid to write ourselves. It provides us with ideas for papers, edits, answers to p-sets, and so on. It even puts words into mouths in seminars, where probing questions by professors seem less daunting once we know an insightful, yet automated, answer lies in sight.
But in this, we lose sight of perhaps the most important aspect of ourselves: our authenticity.
For how can debates be had with peers when you are nothing but a face for thoughts generated for you, not by your own ideation, but by a robot? How do you speak with another if you are not sure that they aren’t simply reading off a script generated from code? How do you learn to write if it is being done for you? How do you learn to think if you allow a machine to automate that precious process?
The you here is not meant to be accusatory. I’d argue far more than a few of us (including myself) are guilty of using AI for the sake of convenience at least once in our high school and collegiate lives. And this problem is not unique to Yale’s student body or even youth in general. Around the world, artificial intelligence seems to be surreptitiously supplanting human authenticity: Members of Parliament use it to write their speeches, journalists use it to generate text for their articles, professors use it to grade papers, and so on.
Instead, the you is simply meant to illustrate that when this practice becomes commonplace—when it becomes normal for your speech and words to be driven not by genuine thought but regurgitated information you had a machine generate for you,we lose not only you but the foundation of authenticity that our lives are grounded upon.
The increasing automation of life means that much of our lives is no longer real—orders are conducted via machine at restaurants, automated messages await us at the end of most phone calls, and some even find companionship in chatbots.
This is devastating. If your words are not real, if that speech was not delivered from the heart, if that essay you wrote and comment you made in seminar was not a true and genuine expression of your thought, how can we engage with this world? Authenticity is what buttresses our moments with meaning. It is what provides dependability to promises and embeds truth into our words. Authenticity allows for us to know each other, to see each other, to speak and converse and understand that we are speaking with someone human who is richly unique in their very own way.
When it becomes acceptable for one’s words to no longer be their own—for their thoughts to be that of a machine and their voice simply a conduit for the outputs of an algorithm—we further lose what we have already lost: the ability to discern between the real and the fake, to tell apart the authentic and its opposite.
That is not to suggest that all hope is lost, nor is it to suppose that the utilization of artificial intelligence will somehow lead to the total automation of our world. It is to say, however, that there is something important in the authenticity of speech and communication. That there does exist some inarticulable thing that distinguishes between the human and the not, between the real and the fake. For it is not the same thing when one speaks in seminar from their heart and when one speaks from the words an automated model has strung together from the most statistically probable combinations. It is the simple fact that being human matters, that speaking as a human and not as a machine matters.
That you, and your words, matter.
You are living, and you are breathing, and you are in possession of some of the most beautiful capabilities in the world. You can speak, think, and write. You know, understand, and are capable of the great beauty of thought, and it is simply untenable for any of us—you included—to neglect those capabilities in favor of a machine. Authenticity of words and thought matter because it is an expression of our humanity in this world, providing us with a foundation for our rational lives and exercising some of our most foundational capabilities.
You provide realness to this world.
None of us are to blame for the situation we have found ourselves living in.
But it is ours, nonetheless. The fact that none of us consented to this new world hides that we still can play a role in determining its future. Fatalism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Inevitably and inadvertently, this world is and always will be ours.
We therefore must work to defend it. We must not cede our ground in this battle for realness and humanity. We must not disregard our voices for the sake of convenience, nor allow ourselves to further automate our lives away. Instead, let us relish in the friction that is life, in the inadvertent struggle that accompanies the process of thought. Ease and luxury are empty ideals that lure us away from the frictions of our lives. But good things are oft-not easy, and we must fight to defend the humanity of our thoughts, feelings, and words against the slow descent into automation. Do not evade the burden and gift of your humanity in pursuit of convenience and ease.
For what will become of us when we and our words no longer have any meaning?
