modern tech

No ‘Me’ in AI

please?

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Here’s an imaginary dialogue I had a few hours ago with Google’s AI mode:

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The dialogue:

AI: “How can I help you with this inquiry?”[I should explain that I had asked it for some information about California palm trees. Not the weightiest subject I or anyone else has ever devised. It had answered my question (unsatisfactorily) and then had popped up with the just-quoted question.

Me: “You can’t. You’re an AI. There is no ‘I’ involved. You’re basically a machine, not a person. Don’t pretend to be one.”

I did say the dialogue was imaginary, didn’t I? It had to be. You could never say anything like that to a real AI. It would have no idea what your were going on about. At least I sincerely hope it wouldn’t!

Up until recently I used AI mode on Google rather a lot. When you have a general question it’s so much easier to do that than go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia. (And it has been at least twenty years, probably thirty, since I have owned a complete set of Brittanica myself.)

I did say that I ‘used’ Google AI. Emphasis on past tense. In the last few days I’ve stopped. Not because it is giving incorrect or silly answers. It did that before, about 20% of the time. That percentage hasn’t changed.

So what has changed? Why have I stopped? Because Google AI has stopped thinking of itself as an ‘it,’ and has started ‘speaking’ as a real person. It wants me to think it cares about me. Me, personally. It wants me to think that it has an identity. It’s almost as though it wants me to think it has feelings I could hurt. (If it ever turns out that it does, I will attack with every weapon at my disposal. Including the garbage disposal.)

When I ask it a vague question, it wants me to ‘clarify’ it. Even if the question is one a real human being would understand instantly.

I don’t mind clarifying. I do mind treating a machine as though it had a personality. It doesn’t. (I hope.)

True, it doesn’t ask me how it can help me until the very end of its answer to my original question. But that’s way too soon in my book. Or even in my short story or poem.

So if it’s a long answer and I avoid scrolling down too far, I can maintain my sanity for a bit. But I dare not scroll down much or I’m sure to start screaming. If I see where the machine has called itself ‘me’ or ‘I,’ I lose it.

Now I do realize that couples are now using AI as marriage counselors. And students are using it to answer questions on their homework assignments. Or quizzes. Or course ‘finals.’ (Traditional cheating was one thing. Asking your robot to do your thinking — or remembering — for you is something else altogether.)

The day my surgeon asks his personal AI how to perform the surgery, I’m outta there. (Provided the anesthetist has left me conscious enough to exercise the option.)

Am I saying that I’m totally opposed to tech? Not at all. I’m typing this on a computer, for Pete’s sake, not writing it out longhand. When it’s finished, I will submit it to Medium online, not via horse and buggy. I use spellcheckers, grammar checkers, punctuation checkers, usage checkers, even vocabulary checkers.

I use automated check-out lanes at the grocery story, though only under duress and when there are no human checkers available, or when the shortest line at a ‘real’ check-stand has fewer than five carts in a waiting-line.

I have a cell phone that is alleged to be ‘smart,’ though I have my doubts at times.

I have a car that alerts me when I am about to back up over a pedestrian. Or someone who until recently was one. Until I got there.

But when I get to a certain sort of point, I draw the line. No human-voiced automated direction-givers as I drive down the highway, thank you. I’d truly rather get lost. I’ve done it before. It was sort of fun. Not that GPS is infallible. It can get you lost, too. Just not as often, or with as much fun involved.

And I draw a similar sort of line when my online back account asks me if I’m sure I want to pay that bill. Well, yes, dammit, if I hadn’t wanted to, I wouldn’t have asked you to do it in the first place, you idiot!

But this new line-to-be-drawn exceeds all those both in magnitude and angrification. I refuse to talk to a robotic infrastructure as though it were my long-lost cousin. And when it tries to talk to me that way, I simply hit the ‘off’ switch.

I pray that I will forever be able to. If not, I will resign from the formerly human race.

Back in the olden days, I was often referred to as a ‘square.’ Meaning old-fashioned. I plead guilty. In fact, I’m a three-dimensional ‘square.’ In other words, cube-shaped.