AI excels at counterfeiting the human mind. If we’re not vigilant, it will think for us—leaving our own intelligence dormant, our creative impulse atrophied.
Already, much of our news is machine produced at news outlets like AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, recapping the latest happenings in news, sports, and entertainment.
It can project us into videos, put words in our mouths, falsify who we are.
Writing in the Free Press, Tylan Cowen warns that within the next few years, AI will author most “of the words written in the United States.” He contends AI is much smarter than us, encyclopedic in scope, capable of writing our books and news for us.
New advances in technology assure its omnivorous takeover of much of everyday life. Indeed, we’re on the threshold of Ray Bradbury’s apocalyptic new world.
Bradbury foresaw a future of stupefying distraction—a civilization that traded reflection for amusement. With AI, his warning no longer reads as metaphor but as prophecy.
AI’s intelligence is borrowed; it knows only what its creators feed it. In the wrong hands, it becomes a megaphone for manipulation—its outputs polished, persuasive, and perilously biased.
AI cannot think for itself. What it spews out can prove toxic, prodigious in conspiracy, disseminating division that may spill into violence.
Algorithms are predictive. They know our wants and pile-on their overtures. Increasingly, they orchestrate our choices. Corporate driven, they offer a pecuniary bonanza servicing their interests.
AI outsources cognition. Invading scholarship, it’s become the campus Cliff Notes, shortcutting inquiry, analysis, and reasoning. It can summarize a complex Faulkner novel in milliseconds, replete with analysis. Why read at all? Why bother with the professor?
AI’s convenience comes at the price of serendipity: the unplanned discovery that alters our thinking, robbing us of the slow astonishment that once expanded the boundaries of our knowing.
AI proliferates plagiarism, the theft of another’s thought, masquerading as one’s own. It’s become the teacher’s nemesis: how do I know the student’s writing is their own?
AI homogenizes the writing act, making us all sound alike—the short, staccato sentences; simplified vocabulary; the annulling of the cumulative, crafted sentence, subtle in its syntactical variation, rhythms, and nuance. It’s the ultimate in dumbing down.
The heart of the matter, however, is AI’s largesse as a substitute for thought, straying into amnesia—a prosthetic for our inner murmurings.
—RJ
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Yes, much of this is true. But I keep coming back to the question the piece leaves open. AI, like the computer, is here to stay. So where is it actually useful, and which parts of the work are worth keeping in our own hands?
A friend of mine says she doesn’t use AI to write because she writes better than it does. I agree. She does. And so do I! There’s a pleasure in finding the sentence that says exactly what I mean. Sometimes I only find out what I mean halfway through writing it. Why would I give that part away?
Journalism is a good example. AI can help a reporter organize interview notes, compare two versions of a document, or spot a question the reporting has left unanswered. Then comes the work that makes the story worth reading. The journalist calls someone back, checks a claim against the original source, decides what matters, and writes the piece in a voice of their own. Frankly, if a journalist is eager to hand over the writing of every story, I wonder what drew them to the profession in the first place.
You ask, “Why read at all?” Well, because reading Faulkner is an entirely different experience from knowing what happens in a Faulkner novel. A summary can tell a student how the story ends. A conversation after reading it can help that student work out why the ending bothers them, or why they disagree with someone else’s interpretation. That’s a perfectly good use of AI, and it may send the student back to a page they would otherwise have passed over.
I understand the worry about losing the pleasure of an unexpected discovery. That’s precisely why I’d judge AI by what happens after it gives an answer. If a reporter makes another call or a student goes back to the book, it has earned its place in the work.
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