AI is coming. There's no doubt about that. It's as inevitable as spreadsheets in 1970s and 80s.
Spreadsheets (essentially these are accessible database tables) had an inevitable impact on the way we thought. Projections of numbers far into the future, suddenly required very little effort, and people started to believe in and work from those projections. What was important -- and what was possible -- was to understand how the tool affected your thinking. It's the same with AI. We will use its illusions -- of being a person or making decisions -- because there are productivity gains to be had and humans love productivity. But if we want to be sane and moral people, we need to keep remembering what the illusions are and make efforts to steer around them.
Here's on modest proposal: Anything produced by AI ought to have a label on it that says something like, "AI was involved in the production of this document" or "AI was involved in the decision to accept or reject you from admission to the university." The test of whether or not the tool can fool you into thinking a human did it is ethically unsound. Labels to avoid that illusion seem like the minimum we can do.
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David Long
University of Nevada, Reno
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