Is A.I. really good at all?

A.I. is a technology which essentially everyone has heard of but with the way A.I. works, does it actually make you more productive or is it just going to doom the world? It seems to be more trouble than it’s worth, for example, schools are probably more likely to accuse you of plagiarism now more than ever because now chatting with an A.I. is a free website where all you need is an account. Over time, as it improves itself, you probably won’t even be able to tell the difference between something real, and something not. I read a comment on Reddit about how in the future to verify you’re human, you’d probably have to list places to pirate content because an A.I. would be too good of a “person” to provide you with such information, but that would also mean A.I. or robots would be so common, it would be hard to find or detect them as they maliciously browse the internet once thought to be safe from A.I. content. 

The first thing many people will claim A.I. does well is productivity, however, A.I. is inherently for when you are lazy. If you don’t want to do a task, you just ask ChatGPT, and it will come back with the answer. If I had a question to ask, you could just ask ChatGPT and it will already know what the answer is with complete accuracy. This would be great if it could take you to find the answer but it just gives you the answer. What’s worse is that you most likely can do that, nothing is stopping you from asking it to teach you the answer to your problem but at the same time I guess that wouldn’t matter as much if you’re the one writing something. 

With all of that, it does seem productivity is a valid reason though, if you want to push out code quickly, just whip up your Python scripts or PowerShell using ChatGPT and you won’t have to bother with anything complex. It looks like you just saved time. But, this is not the fuller picture, it’s been known to provide bad code, code that doesn’t work or code that is falsified, as it can’t always keep up with new updates to the software you work with.

For students though, saving time means you aren’t required to have critical thinking skills, especially in classes where your thinking is done in writing. If it’s easy to submit a four page essay on an event in history and you don’t have to cite sources, it’s an easy A for anyone using ChatGPT. You aren’t required to really even edit the paper because what you get on the screen is everything you would need to submit. You didn’t learn anything from a classroom, the place you are meant to learn.

Not only that but A.I. doesn’t even know how people may act or speak. Instead of my real opinion about what I would say about ChatGPT, the A.I. might instead say I think it’s a personal companion, an all in one tool for everything I need. Again, my real thoughts are different but this opinion was formed without me actually having it or expressing it directly, showing I didn’t need to think about anything on my own. I can let the A.I. no matter how wrong it is, write a paper on whatever I want and give an opinion. With the advent of even more services promising to be as uncensored as possible, who knows what kind of outright wrong things they will be casually allowed to say. 
 Most models were also trained off of stolen documents, books and more, rather than being trained off of random data or legally acquired ones. Facebook notably was barely in trouble for stealing books to train their various models. 
Plagiarism isn’t just a part of the AI, it’s a part of using it too. if it’s easy to plagiarize an essay and the work it used to create was also plagiarized, like with the case of The New York Times suing Microsoft over using its work to train models, then at any time you use A.I. it would be considered plagiarism. 
And after A.I. has taken over the world, what kind of problems would need to be solved anymore? Want to make a music app? It probably has not only been created by A.I. but any feature you could possibly think of would already be on that app. Why would you go and make one yourself if there’s already a perfect app? Why make movie studios which compete with A.I. ones, when the A.I. can make content faster than you or your team and make more money than you may ever see? This will only grow to platforms like YouTube where creators who make long form content, or critiques get out done by content quickly made with A.I. to satisfy YouTube’s need for long form content. With the push of a button, an A.I. made channel would have three hour long video essays to replace the humans who take three months to do the same.