It's artificial, but it's not intelligence

So my phone's battery was dying, and as sometimes occurs to me in such situations, I thought maybe I should turn it off to save the last bit of the battery in case I needed it for an emergency. I pulled out my phone and pressed down on the power button, which had always in the past been the way to shut down the phone, but a recent software update had apparently changed that. I was greeted by a message that I had activated the "AI assistant" for my phone now, and what would I like to ask it? There was no option to shut off the assistant, or to shut off the phone, and I struggled in vain to pull up the phone's settings and find the setting that would reprogram the button to do what it used to. The phone died.

This was more than simply a minor frustration. I don't want an AI assistant on my phone. I just want to use my phone the same as I always have. I'm tired of the way AI chatbots have become so pervasive in our society, and I want it to stop.

Earlier this year, I applied for a job. To my dismay, I found that the job application process was gatekept by an AI chatbot. It asked me if I would prefer an interview on Tuesday at 11:00 or 2:30. I responded that neither was convenient for me. The bot said, "Okay, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with." It couldn't help me with scheduling an interview at a different time. It couldn't connect me with a human. It couldn't seem to actually help me in any way, and it was my only contact at the company I had applied to. I never got an interview.

I don't want an AI assistant on my phone, but I also don't want one on my search results. I don't want AI to sum up what's happening on my social media, or to help me write a post. I don't want AI to help me navigate your website or to rewrite my resume. I certainly don't want AI to manage my health insurance coverage or the operations of my government.

One of the biggest problems with AI is that the I is supposed to stand for "Intelligence", which seems to be completely lacking in the AI chatbots that tech companies are presenting us with. They seem to be rather accomplished at sounding fairly human, but not so accomplished at actually thinking about what they have to say. They'll say whatever sounds like the right thing to say based on sentences that they have read, rather than what might be actual fact. And that seems to be the state of the science as it now stands.

This is problematic on many different levels, one of which is the amount of misinformation that is out there in the world that no doubt was a big part of the data that was fed into these language models. The other part is that people seem to be very ready to trust AI to feed them "facts", completely oblivious to the fact that that's not what they are programmed to do. I had an argument with a woman on social media on an important topic, and on her side of the conversation, there was a lot of, "ChatGPT says..." I couldn't seem to explain to her that ChatGPT was not actually a source for factual information, and she just kept going back to ChatGPT for her source. I know this will not be the last time I have such a conversation.

The other problem with this technology, for those not in the know, is the fact that it requires a massive amount of energy to operate. Behind these bots are data centers that are using up a great deal of power, and also using literal tons of water to cool their processors. All of this just to supply users with more sophisticated sounding misinformation.

I don't want to be part of it. More than that, I want to make it go away, because I feel like it's hurting our society. It's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity, and it seems like people who use it stop using their brains. But like so much technology in the past, it's out there, and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.