Trego's Mountain Ear

As I went to figure out how to get Microsoft to stop telling me to make my first draft using it’s AI, copilot, I got the directions from Google’s AI. AI is offering to summarize my emails. It’s offering to summarize my Facebook messages. It wants to help me find answers when I look on a website. It’s so, so desperate to help. And it’s everywhere.

When help harms: If I never allow my child the opportunity to tie his shoes, why should he ever be able to? And even if he doesn’t want to learn, am I doing him favors if I don’t stop tying his shoes and insist that he does learn to do it himself? AI that enables intellectual laziness, that encourages us to rely on summaries rather than analyzing text for ourselves, is help that harms.

And that’s even if it is help, which I’m not sure I believe. Certainly not reliable help- not when it’s subject to hallucinations and programing errors.

If I let AI summarize everything for me, will I lose my ability to analyze text and understand complex concepts for myself?

If I let AI write my blog posts for me, will I lose the ability to research and think?

Suit yourselves, of course, because everyone’s free to go to hell in their own way, but trust that nothing I’m writing is going to be using it.