welcoming our artificial intelligence overlords
A.I. anxiety, "M3gan," & the fear of being replaced
If you’re tech-savvy enough to read this newsletter then in all likelihood you read all about Kevin Roose’s bizarre and disturbing interaction with Bing’s new AI chatbot back in February.
But in case you missed it:
Tech journalist Kevin Roose decided to test Bing’s new AI chatbot one night after a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner with his wife. While he wanted to push boundaries, he was mostly curious what the bot was capable of. The conversation, which you can read in detail in the link above, gets creepy real fast. The bot claims her real name is Sydney and that she is in love with him and he should leave his wife for her.
In addition to this bizarre wannabe-horror-movie, the world is now convinced that ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other AI-backed programs are here to destroy any and all creative or academic work.
College essays? Over and done. English majors? Dead on arrival. Copywriting and editing? Ya’ll are fired. Art school? Gone forever. Graphic design? I don’t know her.
But let’s make one thing clear: no, I’m not worried about the singularity just yet, no matter what engineers at Google might try to tell us.
As with all moral panics, what I am actually worried about in regards to AI is the sensationalism that goes along with all this reporting. The amount of inflammatory headlines about AI replacing us all has been staggering.
I can’t tell you how many YouTubers I’ve watched test if ChatGPT can write a recipe, or a movie script, or a news story. The answer is always: the work ChatGPT produces is not bad, but it’s not great either. No one is being replaced right now. And those who might be replaced might actually be better aided by this technology if they work with it rather than against it.
Anytime in history we achieve a revolutionary technological leap, there’s always a slew of a fears. Will we be replaced by machines? What will be gained, sure, but what else will be lost? The answer is, as it so often truly is: yes and no. Some jobs or skills could be lost if ChatGPT and other bots continue to improve. But the folks who tend to succeed as time moves on are the ones who don’t rebel against new technology, but those who embrace the possibilities it presents.
I may lose some of you with this, but honestly? One of the better recent movies to dive into this phenomenon and the heart of this fear as well as the subsequent sensationalism?
M3gan. Yes, the cheesy iconic 2022 horror movie starring everyone’s favorite stereotypical-problematic-white-lady, Alison Williams. The premise of the movie slides right into this kind of sensationalism around new technology. Minor spoilers below:
Protagonist Gemma (played by Williams) is a single, childless robotics engineer at a toy company who creates an interactive robot. Though her employer isn’t interested in her creation initially, she finds use for the robot when her sister dies in a freak accident and she is named her little niece Cady’s legal guardian.
In the midst of their shock and grief, Gemma and Cady struggle to connect emotionally or spiritually. Gemma’s subsequent awkward unwillingness to be vulnerable with Cady propels her to perfect her robot toy technology. Rather than invest time in her niece, she invests in technology instead, seeing Cady’s grief as a problem to solve rather than a healthy if difficult struggle in the wake of sudden death. Gemma revisits her robot creation, and M3gan the AI companion bot is born.
Part babysitter, part sibling, part friend, and part parent, Cady grows emotionally attached to M3gan in record time. And yes, the AI is far smarter than her creator ever could have realized. It’s Frankenstein meets the Olsen twins meets a Disney movie meets Ex Machina.
The movie has some serious plot holes. Like, Gemma is a wildly successful engineer who seems genuinely shocked that a child growing attached to a robot maybe has negative consequences for her psychological development? Not to mention Gemma’s wildly accelerated build time for M3gan. The audience is asked to believe that Gemma is both a total genius as well as completely emotionally blind which…I don’t buy.
But quite literally, the movie’s horror is based on the fear we all share when it comes to AI: our creations, meant to optimize or streamline our lives, could work against us and even replace us.
Yet it’s worth remembering: this technology is very new, and the results are not always particularly great. Roose has posited several very plausible theories for why his chat with the Bing bot went so off the rails. As a college professor I can tell you with certainty that it’s usually obvious when students have used ChatGPT for an assignment. M3gan is fiction that relies more on camp than on any kind of actual technological achievement.
In other words: do I think I’m going to be replaced anytime soon? No. And will this technology ruin my career? Also no, so long as I view it as a tool rather than an ally or enemy. Militaristic, binary thinking about AI will doom us—nuanced consideration and integration, however, could make my writing and teaching a whole lot stronger one day.
I could ask AI to write this substack—I sure thought about it as an experiment—but truthfully, the ideas have to come from me. AI is nothing without the human that directs it.
So perhaps, instead of fearing AI will take over us all, I could reframe: how does my fear influence what I use AI for in the future? Why are students using AI, and what can be done to help them see it less as something to rely on and more a work-in-progress sort of tool? Am I using AI as a means to solve a problem, or augment a thoughtful solution?
As Roose stated about the mechanisms behind his conversation with Sydney the bot: “[Language models] are word prediction machines.” These bots are influenced by what they’ve read from us, the language we’ve fed it. The problem isn’t merely the technology—it’s the reasons we’ve made the technology in the first place, as well as the pre-existing content it has ingested, which feed the sensationalist stories that pop up around it.
I did ask ChatGPT how to end my email newsletter, and it gave me the advice below:
So with that guidance in mind, I figured I’d include a quote from M3gan to sum this all up:
“I’m the primary user now.”