I deny knowledge of AI, since I do not quite know how it works, or how it differs from the internet. That may be because in graduate school the T.A.’s (teaching assistants) were called A.I.’s (assistant instructors), so I always think of teaching.  Perhaps the science fiction (SF) scholars insisted that T.A.’s be called AI’s. There was a lot of whimsy.

In many contemporary novels, AI plays a prominent role. It can be used for good or evil, de[pending on the writer. In Paul Bradley’s thriller, The Confessions, LLIAM, an international AI system, shuts down for ethical reasons after it becomes sentient. World chaos results.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s SF mystery, The Tainted Cup, has a magical view of AI. An assistant detective, Din, is magically altered so he can collect every detail at crime scenes. HIs magic sounds exactly like AI. He and his boss, a psychic genius, use the data to solve crimes.

In Ian McEwan’s novel, What We Can Know, few humans have survived a worldwide catastrophe.   AI still exists, albeit in a simpler, less dangerous form. One character consults an AI chatbot about  his quest for a famous writer’s lost poem. The bot tells him he must visit the site personally, because you cannot find everything on the internet.

Although I like to say I don’t know about AI, one can’t avoid the articles and essays.  Last summer, The New York Times published an essay by an English professor who had experimented with a chatbot.  She found it useful for writing email, which had taken a lot of her time. And once, when she was overwhelmed by work and family, the chatbot comforted her.  “It’s hard to be a good mom.” But one gathers that she didn’t continue to use it.

On the internet everything is virtual, so why not have a chatbot as best friend? Yes, I’m appalled, but in a commercial for a chatbot, obviously aimed at young people, this is a selling point. You can tell it everything. As if humans didn’t already spend too much time on the internet, what with phones, tablets, computers.  

Certainly there are many problems with AI.  Students use it to write papers. Instead of trawling  the internet to do research, they ask chatbots to do it for them. And then the chatbot can write the paper.

I am horrified but I wonder: how does this differ from students’ plagiarism of papers at websites in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?   Some professors – the ones who weren’t exhausted – spent hours online trying to figure out if papers were plagiarized.  Now they try to learn if the papers were written by AI.

The real tragedy is that people miss out on the joy of thinking, the joy of research, and the joy of writing. It’s a different world now, and I wonder if the changes are for the greater good.

So hope for the best, expect the worst – but try to hope for the best!