ChatGPT is the fastest-growing app in internet history, and its rapid rise to popularity is understandable: why spend an hour engaging your mental energy when ChatGPT can do a pretty good job of it in 30 seconds? Under the guise of making our lives easier, AI tools have capitalised on the stress of busy modern life and began to make us reliant on them for simple tasks. We can’t escape AI anymore: Google anything, and an AI overview of your search will appear, whether you want it or not. This might help us receive information faster than we would have by browsing the web for five minutes, but has this hyper-availability of information hindered our ability to think for ourselves?
The human brain operates in a “if you don’t use it, you lose it” fashion, meaning that if you don’t actively use your ability to critically solve problems, you risk losing this capability altogether. Outsourcing our mental load onto an AI tool may feel tempting, but it will likely harm our cognitive abilities in the long term. Engaging our brains creates the ideas, inspiration, and motivation that we need to find our work fulfilling. In attempting to re-create human capabilities, generative AI strips us of the human experience of creating. As long as it may take, creating your own work will always be more rewarding than prompting a machine to do it for you.
... why spend an hour engaging your mental energy when ChatGPT can do a pretty good job of it in 30 seconds?
The speed at which AI tools respond to a user’s question masks the huge computation that this software requires. Generative AI uses data centres to search the web and summarise relevant findings within seconds, meaning that a single ChatGPT search uses almost 10 times more energy than a Google search. Aside from using massive amounts of electricity, these data centres require constant cooling to prevent overheating. A single ChatGPT search heats data centres up enough to evaporate half a litre of water. Multiply this by millions of daily ChatGPT searches, and we can understand why global AI is projected to exceed the total water usage of New Zealand in two years time. This environmental impact is kept carefully out of public view so we aren’t dissuaded from using AI. Most people would agree that wasting an entire country’s water use on chatbots which reproduce functions that humans can already do feels pointless at best, and dystopian at worst.
Most people would agree that wasting an entire country’s water use on chatbots which reproduce functions that humans can already do feels pointless at best, and dystopian at worst.
However, generative AI tools are not as “human-free” as we have been led to believe, as they rely on a huge human workforce training them to interpret information correctly. Scale AI is an example of a company who pay extremely low wages to workers to train AI in “digital sweatshops” in the Philippines, with reports of spending hours on a task to earn as little as $2. The difference in profit between these exploited low-level workers and the executives of AI companies cannot be understated.
Although advertised as a way to boost productivity so we have the time to unleash our true potential, in reality AI tools are not designed to benefit individuals, but to maximise profit for the billionaires who invest in its development. When you consider the threat to individual creativity and critical thinking skills, as well as the economic and environmental impact, AI tools no longer feel like an exciting modern innovation.