You become what you do.

We become what we practice. My life is, from the eternal perspective, a cavalcade of actions, thoughts, and desires in sequence, the past forming the present forming the future, all in call-and-response to the world and to God, all within His decree. One part of this is the forming power of my actions now on my character future (and, through my character, on my actions future). In light of this, we must interrogate how we use the neural net AIs, in all their hallucinatory, inhuman power, lest we unwittingly train ourselves against virtue.

AI, that massive misnomer (seeing as it is not intelligent, any more than an abacus is intelligent), AI is very effective at certain tasks. Making readable text, forming plausible answers to questions, assembling tolerable code (I’m told), AI is very, very fast. It uses hideous amounts of computational resources to do so, but it’s very fast. More, it requires essentially no hard work from the user- prompting is a skill, sure, but learning to exploit that system is orders of magnitude less intensive than learning to write good prose.

(AI does readable prose, not good prose. AI does plausible answers, not good ones. AI does tolerable code, not reliable or good code (I’m told; my coding experience amounts to plodding, mechanical HTML backend in WordPress.))

Every time I use AI to find information, though, I’m letting AI do the thinking, the analysis, and the investigation. Now, with massive amounts of information, there’s an amount of mechanical searching where using an algorithm (AI is a big algorithm) makes sense; the concerns I have about AI here, in finding search engine results, etc, are more focused on quality than the fact of usage (albeit when the amount of sources available is small, using AI is inadvisable for wisdom reasons).

AI, however, promises to do more than identify possible sources. AI, as demonstrated by the ever-helpful AI summaries which clutter the top bars of our search engines, is being offered to replace your ability to assemble, weigh, and decide on the information you find. AI is offered to you as a replacement for art made by actual people, which has the second-order effect of reducing the incentive and opportunity for those people, photographers and designers and artists across a swathe of visual mediums, to exercise their craft.

AI offers easy replacement for work. But that’s the trap. If somebody said, “You could just let this handy-dandy machine here lift those weights,” you’d find it absurd. Exercise’s very point is that you lift the weights. In learning, though, the point seems to be that you get the information at the end; the process seems irrelevant. Consider, however: is not part of the point of learning that you grow your capacity to learn? Don’t you learn better when you know how to learn better? Can you become skilled in learning if you off-load much of the work of learning to somebody else?

AI, thus, fosters laziness and inability. Using the AI to get my answer, even in the most trivial cases, is training myself to rely on the AI, not on my own analytical capabilities (albeit, in the more trivial cases, I avoid AI more because it seems in-principle wrong to rely on meaningless machine data over intentional human communication). The more I rely on the AI, the less weight I bear, till, like the astronaut whose bones snap under earth’s gravity or the invalid who hasn’t walked in years, I cannot support my own weight. I become a puppet of whatever the AI thinks (which is generally going to align with what the AI’s maker thinks- if it deviates significantly, after all, the maker will generally just alter it, unless he is caught in the death-spiral of trusting his own creation).

Don’t use AI (when you can help it), not in any way you can do yourself. Weigh carefully how you use AI, even, considering how your use of it affects others (no, one person’s actions don’t constitute societal change, but they are a prerequisite thereto). Use AI to find information, perhaps, but do not cripple yourself by relying on it to understand or apply that information. Go, stretch your intellectual muscles, and glorify God with mind and soul, not just heart and body (Duet. 6:4-5; Matt. 22:37).

God bless.