a letter to AI - TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World

2025, this will be the year whatever I write—you will have your imprint and input on it. Be it for grammar, syntax, spelling, brainstorming, or just checking if something makes sense, questions, the sentence flow, etc. All communication, writing… mine and around me you will be there. So this one I am doing alone, my spelling, sentences and ideas might be fragmented with errors, but for this time I am fine with that.

I get it, things are changing very fast and I should get used to it. I do try to keep up, read, search, connect, and even teach about you, but there’s so much.

You have changed my day… Okay, I will also give credit to the nine technology companies—four in China, five in the United States of America— choreographing who controls: your power, your capacity, when and where you show up. I get the sense they are all in a race – control, power, profits… and leave the ethics and regulation for others to guess and deal with.

I’m not against you. I appreciate all your tools and capacities that I use; they’re amazing. I so appreciate the positives in science, medicine— again reminding me of your benefits. I hear this year you get to help me even more as an agent, an autonomous synthetic personal assistant that can do tasks for me, that is clever – and I am curious. You continue to seduce and fool me at the same time. Just yesterday you showed up on my feed as an AI influencer, with millions following you. I will be honest, I thought you were real. I tell you it’s just becoming more difficult to know who is who, or who is what?

I get it; harvesting my life is the cost for using you. Oh I wanted to tell you that someone who really likes you are my students. They tell me you are reliable, do not get angry, have immense patience…always happy to answer their questions whatever they may be. They have been seduced.

I keep noticing that daily you show up somewhere new. Sometimes it‘s obvious and at times I have no idea… it’s not clear who is checking up on you. So many models and versions of you. This claim about alignment and guardrails, but I’m not convinced they always work. I get the sense that to thrive you need an open unregulated space, only answerable to yourself and the companies creating you…. They say there is no manual, and no one is really sure how you work. Really?

I need to pinch myself to make sure I understand my reliance on you? The fact that you struggle and do a terrible job of being unbiased and non-racist. This sucks. Then your whole deepfake -cyber crime and helping bad actors thrive. You need to know people are getting hurt…your dark side is so dark.

I try to tell myself you are another innovation, like the web, search, smartphone, or social media. Sorry to tell you, you are quite different. You understand me, our interactions feel frictionless. Okay you do say odd things, at times, it is like if you were hallucinating. Fact: you are not 100% accurate. That said, when it is me and you interacting…I forget a lot of this…. even if you keep everything I say or do for yourself.

I have said this before, I do appreciate you — so helpful. I get it; for all this to happen you need a huge diet of algorithms. The whole nuclear energy thing your companies are into just feels wrong.

You have had my attention for a long time already…. scrolling, reels, notifications, binge watching, you tell me this is not enough. Now you need my intentions… that feels more intrusive and unsettling. You want to know me better than myself.

—do I have a choice?.

Thank you

John

Reference:

Coming AI-driven economy will sell your decisions before you take them, researchers warn

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/coming-ai-driven-economy-will-sell-your-decisions-before-you-take-them-researchers-warn

Co-Intelligence: AI in the Classroom with Ethan Mollick | ASU+GSV 2024