‘A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.’
—Alan Perlis, American computer scientist.
At first, I planned to fully write this, my first column, using an artificial intelligence (AI) writer.
But somehow, AI wasn’t able to do that. People are praising the miracle that is AI, especially after it descended to the mainstream of late, but this isn’t new.
We are all aware of its abilities, but more importantly, its limitations. That is where the brains of the computer cannot (yet) overcome or replace humans.
It is about the human thoughts and being able to decide what is appropriate and what isn’t.
I mean AI most probably was trained by engineers who would feed it the vast information from the academics, crawling through mountainous journal articles and research papers.
But colloquially, it is not able to fully comprehend what humans want – particularly in an opinion piece, one that is easy to comprehend as well as represent the feelings, apprehensions, sentiments and emotions of a writer.
No doubt, when it matures, it will be able to churn out the works of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – for those murder mystery fans.
I bet it will be able to imitate and clone the works of these great writers to a tee, meticulously including the certain nuances and idiosyncrasies that are signature traits of the writers.
But what it is not and could never be is just to be human.
The split-second decisions, the randomness that is choice – flip-flopping between one thought to another – and the indecisiveness that is probably the human’s Achilles heel, these are our standout traits.
Of course, in the training of AI models to harness their intelligence, the scientists and engineer would have to overcome a dilemma.
“Should we train this AI to be just like human with human traits – or should we train it to be something that we are not?”.
That is a big dilemma – because it requires a balancing act of either imitating humans or being mere robots. I believe the latter is the easier choice.
Because it means that we are able to benefit from the development of AI towards research, literature and its ability to scan through hundreds and thousand of pages of academic papers to provide a summary.
It will be able to run a statistical model to calculate the probability of something occurring such as in the case of natural disasters, taking into account various factors including information on the earth’s movements, raindrops, humidity and diminutive tremors.
AI will be able to take over or assume the role which are too dangerous for humans nowadays, such as going to a deep-sea exploration to find fossils and uncover the marine life at the deepest parts of the ocean.
It can be launched into space to conduct research activities on a foreign planet where it may be too costly to transport human scientists, not to mention the risks involved.
No doubt, the human civilisation has and will continue to benefit from the advancements in technology, particularly AI.
Automation is a crucial component to efficiency; the ability to save man hours and reducing a task to mere minutes or seconds is ground-breaking.
However, with everything, there is a limit to which we can employ our binary counterparts to fulfil human tasks.
Particularly in the world of journalism, where report writing is part and parcel of that, AI will, to the best of its abilities, generate a news report.
But then again, it will not be good – it will not be the same as one a human journalist would write. Possibly, its applications will benefit civilian journalists who try to understand news writing.
It is an imitation, without human thoughts, emotions and the appropriate articulation of facts. There lie its limitations.
We should regard AI – particularly services such as ChatGPT, Smodin and Copy.AI, as being a superior evolution of search services to gather information.
While previously, it would generate links as search results, now, it can present the results in the form of articles.
That is how we should treat it — as a medium of information gathering and nothing more. It is not going to replace the jobs of human journalists – it never could.
To say such would show the lack of understanding in both journalistic work and technology limitations.
