What are we getting for all that energy, heat, water, and industrial pollution?

Are we talking about chatbots and using algorithms as surrogate friends, brainstorming companions, or digital therapists?

Is the term referring to generative slop engines, tokens turned into bland text and deceptive images and feed-filling reels?

Or, are we contemplating data processing by untiring neural nets, churning through problems composed of data sets impossibly too large to imagine?

Perhaps your only use of AI is as a tool to speed up the work that you were already going to do, as if AI were a calculator on steroids or an audio transcription genie?

The list goes on.

And I don’t have a clear answer to which even I personally mean on a given day. 

But thinking more on the AI dichotomy encountered by my daughter in the world higher education I think there is an interesting starting point for evaluation that comes from the opposing messaging she found there. On one side, technical students were encouraged to explore the potential of AI while on the other side, arts students were threatened with academic censure for even suggesting they thought about engaging with an algorithm.

The axis here is one of “right” answers.

On one end of the chart there is certainty. Either human or AI when engaged with a problem will come up with a truth, mathematical or logical or scientific. The AI is a shortcut.

On the other end of the chart is fuzziness. The problem is one with a highly variable and creative output, and while the AI is still a shortcut, it is also a bypass of the meat brain for which the final output would be a measure of expression, skill, and ideas.

Both are forms of AI, both have social, environmental, and human impacts in their use, but makes the algorithm a tool while the other makes it a cheat.

The day before I’m writing this we took the dog for a walk and she started telling me about a contradiction she encountered in her first days of classes this term. 

Her profs, uniformly, told her that use of AI in any way, shape or form would be grounds for referral for academic disciplinary action. It would not be tolerated. Stern warning proffered.

Quite differently, her boyfriend, who is doing a business degree, was told virtually the opposite rule: AI is the new reality, so we kind of expect that you’ll learn how to use it effectively.  Collective academic shrug followed.

Same university. Different colleges. Opposite inclinations.

“Look,” I told her. “You’ve come up against the troubling rift in defining what AI actually is. For a business student—or similarly a science student or an engineering student—AI is a fancy calculator that double checks their work and makes them more efficient at getting to the answer.” 

Heck, I’m a writer and I use a spellchecker without hesitation. I’d be crazy not to use one.

“On the other side, when you’re doing an arts degree, they are trying to teach you how to think, how to analyze, how to create and make and flex that very human muscle in your head.” the conversation continued. “AI is no longer just a tool to assist your work in that situation. It’s a replacement for your whole brain. A generative AI writes the whole answer.”

For that same kind of effort, my writing will never, ever—ever, ever, ever—use generative AI. I will under no circumstances use AI to turn my thoughts into paragraphs of generative text.  Fixing my spelling and catching obvious technical mistakes is one thing, but replacing my brain and style and the very joy of doing the work itself, well, that is a whole other vibe.

“I guess so.” She shrugged. “What’s the point of paying for a degree that’s meant to teach you how to think critically and to use your brain if you just let a computer do all the work?”

What’s the point indeed?