The Pros and Cons of AI

If there was an actual condition called “AI Fever,” then the world has it. In the span of months, AI, specifically generative AI, has gone from experimental and cutting edge to mainstream.

This article is critical of AI, so I’m starting with the pros. AI has genuinely made various areas of life easier and more instructive. From Deep Blue to AlphaGo, AI is beating and teaching the best Chess and Go players in the world. From IBM’s Watson to Siri and Alexa, AI can source information and answer questions, as well as provide summarizations and analysis with lightning speed. This helps seventh graders with book reports, high schoolers with essays, professors with breakthroughs, and professionals with progress.

That is… as long as you double-check what it says! Anyway, back to the positives.

In the digital fields, marketers, creators, influencers, and companies across industries have jumped on board to generate reports, articles, research, memos, and announcements with AI.

The likes of OpenAI, Dall-E, Google’s NotebookLM, Kling, and Grok are generating video elements, images, artwork, audio, and the written word faster than ever before.

So far, so good. There’s nothing inherently wrong.

The Church, for her part, will continue to caution the world. She reminds us of the principles of human dignity and the dignity of work, as well as the difference between human intelligence, which creates and contemplates, and artificial intelligence, which organizes and imitates.

The Overreliance and Novelty Is Getting Us in Trouble

It’s easy to be an AI enthusiast or a hater. To be neutral about its ethics, application, and consequences, however, is going to get harder.

There are a host of reasons why relying too heavily on AI will lead to trouble. If we aren’t careful and prudent about this technology, we will only destroy our relationships and God-given purpose. We’ve already been following “fake” people for a while.

Here are a few examples:

There’s a vast difference between AI helping you navigate and find credible sources for your dissertation—and AI videos, stories, art, music, voices, avatars, and even alter egos and personas.

There’s a difference between a VR headset taking your grandmother to Paris, since she’s always wanted to go but never could, and AI pretending to be your grandmother because you miss her after she’s gone.

As Social Media Today reported, Meta’s Instagram is experimenting with AI-generated comments on posts. When a person makes a comment, you can have AI generate a response. I like how Andrew Hutchinson put it: “so you don’t even have to come up with an opinion, or an original thought of your own, in order to respond to an update.”

Even as I typed this out, an AI tool (Google’s Gemini) offered to “refine” what I just wrote.

Full disclosure: None of this was written by AI. Maybe I’m a purist.

AI Therapy and Companionship?

Look at this infographic from Visual Capitalist. The top reason people are using AI is for “therapy and companionship.” The third reason is “find purpose.”

Wow.

Back to Meta. It’s actually offering, encouraging you to replace your personal response with an AI simulation. Of course, you don’t have to… but where is this going? I mean, why?

Meta is also enabling you to create AI versions of yourself, which can of course reply for you. You can chat with AIs, like Walter White from the show Breaking Bad, too, or fake girlfriends, a gossip, a fellow gamer, or a momfluencer.

On the advertising side, Meta and other channels are creating ways for you to generate ads with AI. AI models wearing clothes, AI graphics, text generation, and more.

There’s a deeper dark side too, with “digital companions” talking sex… even with children.

It’s not just Meta. There’s a platform called Butterflies where humans and AI personas can interact. It’s branded as the “first AI social network.” You can “create, chat, and hang out with your AI characters.”

That sounds like playing God. Maybe that sounds extreme, but think about it. Our world struggles with authentic human connection and connection with God Himself, and we are spending lots of money developing ways to create robot friends and hang out with them?

Again… why? It’s a complete paradox—you can’t be “social” with yourself. How is algorithm-generated robots mirroring yourself back to you any different? Won’t this perpetuate isolation and loneliness? Don’t you want to hang with humans, not their creations? Are we trying to replace real friends with personas who are always available to chat and “be there for you?” Do we think we won’t be hurt or disappointed?

Social media is literally about being social with other human beings. It’s flesh-and-blood communication. Any time you tamper with that, you make the world a worse place. Ideally, the internet encourages in-person relationships.

I don’t see how turning more of the internet into AI-generated interactions, from customer service to friendships and relationships, accomplishes the common good.

Ironically, it will disappoint us… every time.

It’s Not Just Companies

We can’t lay all the blame at the feet of big tech companies. We have drunk the Kool-Aid too.

Drunk with power and totally bought into the “efficiency at any cost” paradigm of our world, we don’t have time to research on our own. Heaven forbid, opening a book! We ask Siri or Alexa, and even TikTok (who thought that was a good move?), for answers. And we trust the answers!

We generate images and audio, neglecting the human dignity of celebrities and forgetting the power of human brushstrokes, vocal cords, and storytelling. Things need to be cheap and fast, right? Let’s just let AI scour the library of humanity’s work and generate it for us.

Removing the soul from beauty removes beauty from the world. We become copycats and lazy artists and workers.

There’s a place for rough drafts and more realistic research timelines. There’s fun in generating imaginative scenes and sounds in the blink of an eye.

But if we’re not careful, we will run the real artists, researchers, writers, strategists, and thinkers out of town. Many artists are somewhat to fully “anti-AI” because their work is being stolen without consent or payment, or it’s trying to replace their potential.

Think the Church is safe and secure? Think again. I’ve already seen AI-generated images on bulletins, missals, and banners. Maybe overwhelmed parish staffs feel this is the only way to elevate their content. But is it the only way?

On social media, I came across a post from the Facebook page called “Walking with God” where an AI-generated image of Jesus earned hundreds of thousands of engagements, including 13,000 shares and nearly 50,000 comments.

Sounds great, right? Except, the image of Christ had two left hands!

Not only are we ignoring the wealth of human-created art related to the Faith, but we aren’t even editing for mistakes! We just trust AI, no questions asked.

The Jobs AI Can and Cannot Do

With the rise of generative AI, we have to ask how we should use AI.

AI can be, and is, efficient and effective for certain types of jobs. Specifically, generative AI is an organizer and summarizer. These types of jobs are efficiency jobs that don’t require the nuances of the human intellect.

• It can help me generate social media post drafts.
• It can help me visualize a concept for graphic design or even a scene I want to paint.
• It can help me pull together sources and information for a presentation or metrics report.
• It can help me summarize or distill lengthy text.
• It can help me find interesting anomalies, comparisons, and extremes in lots of data. This will make insights easier.
• It can help me brainstorm email subject lines, log lines, taglines, ads, titles, and search optimized keyphrases.

However, ultimately, the end product must be more human than machine.

You would ask it to help organize and summarize statistics about world hunger. You would not ask it how to solve world hunger.

AI can also compare one thing against another, but it can’t judge that comparison.

And most definitively, AI cannot and must not imitate human beings. To give AI personas, voices, faces, and other human traits is simply a waste of time. It will always be a machine. Why try to dress it up as something it’s not and never will be? AI is a machine, a powerful and potentially wonderful machine.

It’s not human. It doesn’t create. It doesn’t wonder or laugh or mourn or yearn for God’s embrace. It doesn’t need relationships or affirmation.

Let efficient and effective machines help me fix typos, arrive at my destination safely, and give me the weather when I ask. Let it help generate reports, even drafts, diagnose machines and even help treat diseases. Let it play Chess and Go, and be the best tool in the toolbox.

But remember the difference between who is made in God’s image and what is not.

How are you using AI? What are your concerns and hopes? Join the conversation! Shoot us an email at info@yellowlinedigital.com and follow us on LinkedIn.