AI is bad because it cuts into human-created existence and experiences with machine made experience. It is the equivalent of a Chips Ahoy in place of actual homemade chocolate chip cookies and even worse…it wastes time. Consider this. When you are not experiencing life fully because you are sorting AI questions and materials, what are you missing out on? AI is bad precisely because you are losing far more precious opportunities, and your thinking is being rewired, due to the need to respond to these tasks. Freedom is lost. 

Ridiculously Burdensome Forms

AI is bad because not only does it outsource people and replace them with machines, it is bad because it is used to cause people to have to do additional questions on paperwork or perhaps I should say digital forms, much of which is of such incidental import that if it actually had to be communicated by a person no one would require it to be done. Think of excessive charting requirements already occupying nurses and hospital staff to the detriment of the time they spend with patients, now accelerated by the additional demands that can be generated using AI. 

In teaching, it’s the same. The legislature creates new documentation requirements for teachers, and they are created and not used. It’s not a good use of anybody’s time, but because machines are managing it, no one puts a stop to it. 

I sincerely doubt overall health or education will be improved. The quality of any work done is negatively affected because the fact is, often AI data has not been vetted by a human. The data is entered and never seen again. 

Life is More Than Data

Our life is more than bread and our life is more than data! The reason we go to a museum and see actual artworks instead of just looking at the type of posters they sell at Walmart is because the experience of seeing real art is far superior then the experience of staring at a poster. Some people have claimed that AI can create art. Nonsense. AI lacks a human soul, or for you non-believers and freethinkers, AI lacks a biological human character, either of which prevents it from creating meaningful art on the level a human can. So AI is bad because it is a bad artist as well. 

We Do Not, Actually, Need More Material Wealth at This Point.

At this point humans are no longer struggling to find sufficient food for ourselves, or clothes, or transportation and housing. We may be struggling to distribute the resources that we produce but we have enough goods and resources. The current problem for the individual human and for groups is distribution of time and energy. People are too busy, and with tasks that aren’t meaningful. AI is bad because it’s part of that problem. It focusses your energies where they are not needed, in gaining more of things you already have. 

AI Wastes Time

This is a critical, central reason why AI is bad. It is bad because it automatically creates things that waste time for real humans. It is the individual human whose time and energy can be monopolized and piddled away by low quality experiences such as AI generated content, or God forbid AI generated paperwork tasks. 

Technology Has Always Been a Double Edged Sword

Driving long distances to work, scrolling and shopping for things that may not really be needed but seem enticing, developing relationships based on dating algorithms instead of mutual interests and meeting in real life, all these are examples of how technology waste time, impersonalizes and dilutes the central joys of life which are human experience, human expression, and human relationships, and tempts you to use the valuable minutes of your life on inauthentic and low quality experiences. AI is bad when it creates situations where your time is used to view pictures and videos of things that, on some level, do not represent the best that is thought and said. (My son calls that “doom scrolling.” Often, AI generated ideas and images represent things that could never exist, or that don’t make sense, and then you have cognitive dissonance on top of everything else.  So. AI is bad, it’s the reason you can’t think straight. 

AI Generated Content is not Writing in the Human Sense

Writing produced by AI lacks the force of a human mind behind it. The idea that a machine constructed a sequence of words to try to prove a point to me seems bizarre. In a world in which trying to create rhetorically sound arguments is the name of the game (writing), arguments created by a computer, without reference to the bank of literary tropes that writers use (and without recourse to lived experience) is insipid. I am amazed that anyone would publish AI writing. It seems to me, as a writer, that computer generated writing cannot be trusted. In fact, ChatGPT says at the bottom of the question box, in so many words, “check for errors.” And you should. What reference does a machine have to whether what it is saying is true as opposed to the exploitative and politically-spun crap people have been putting on the internet since the beginning? 

AI is bad also because it steals the writing of real people. We writers may benefit from having our writing used by AI, such as when Google directs people to our website,  but I have a feeling we benefit less than we would have had there not been AI. Google’s use of AI snippets from people’s blogs may ultimately come under scrutiny in terms of copyright violation. Let’s be honest: AI did not write the snippets; it simply borrows them. Which is why they’re not complete garbage. 

As for those who have continually claimed that AI is going to write fiction or even, for that matter, serious essays, I think you need to think again. Such suggestions betray a deep misunderstanding of the remarkable engine of the human brain, the creativity of human language, and the beauty of human emotion, none of which a machine can access. 

An interesting for-instance on the creation of “Non Human Art.” 

I am reminded of a recent study (this report is from the BBC) brought out by two scientists which said that, despite the claim that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of years would produce all the works of William Shakespeare, the truth is that in real life, in real time, all the monkeys in the world given all the time in which the Earth is predicted by science to be here, and typing one letter per second, could not randomly generate a single one of The Bard’s works. 

In fact, to quote the article, “the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence – such as “I chimp, therefore I am” – comes in at one in 10 million billion billion.” The authors go on to conclude that the random generation of high quality Shakespearean type works by monkeys typing randomly is “beyond the scope of the possible in the actual time and material constraints of our universe.”

Now AI might do a little better – it understands subject and verb – but the fact is, people have been claiming that the great works of human thought and art could be randomly or mechanically created for a long time. And it’s bunk. Human minds can touch something beyond the ken of most of us, they can reach to grace or even divine mystery – machines are just tools that turn out widgets. 

Now one might say that  I have not proved AI is bad in all contexts. Indeed inasmuch as AI powers such applications as Momondo.com, a search engine for airline tickets, I do appreciate it. But I have become irritable with the phenomenon of people claiming that AI will solve the problems of the human race, actually create additional wealth, or create serious written work. Or, for that matter, serious artistic works of any type. In addition I am exasperated that no one seems to be noticing that AI creates new work for real humans. Data points cannot replace a holistic view of a person in the eyes of someone who is caring for them. 

A Human Brain is a Different Thing than an AI Brain

There is a structural and radical differential between the human brain and the computer brain, but more than that, a substantial and radical difference in the two types of brain-engines based on the character of their construction. A human brain is simply a different type of thing, accessing random types of data from a multitude of receptors. It cannot be approximated by a “brain” that has only a basis in zeros and ones and a single point of data entry, even if that point of entry is repeated billions of times.  

Here is a more scientific description of this from geeks for geeks:  “Your brain doesn’t work like a computer processor that handles one task at a time. Instead, millions of neurons fire simultaneously, processing everything from the feeling of your shirt against your skin to memories of yesterday’s lunch. This parallel processing lets you walk down the street while having a conversation and spotting a friend across the road – all at once.”

AI is Bad, Notwithstanding the Good Parts

Therefore I tell you that AI is bad, notwithstanding the good things you can obtain with it, notwithstanding that it can generate math problems for second graders, notwithstanding that it allows Google to answer your questions without clicking to an actual page. In the aggregate AI is bad; the damage it does to our lives is far greater than what it helps us with. Technology always has this differential, a push me-pull you kind of thing where we have some benefits and some costs. It seems to me that AI is an unusually negative type of technology, and perhaps that is because it seeks to replace the most precious body part we have, our brain, while sopping up huge quantities of the thing that is most limited for us, that is time. 

Do not be fooled, AI is not saving you time, it is wasting your time. AI is bad. Having lived before it existed, I promise you that it is not helping you with the important stuff, your relationships and your emotional health and your physical health. Your best response to AI is to avoid its use, accepting that sometimes, even often, it may be unavoidable. Get it done and get out. Just say no, like you should also say no to your bad relationships, your bad job, etc. If you ever get the chance, support procedural and legislative controls of AI overreach, which we can only hope may crop up in greater strength and numbers as this scourge of outsourcing “thinking” continues. We are on a spiritual journey, we humans, and AI is in danger of wasting some of our journeying time for a meaningless detour.