Earlier this week in my Ethics and Technology course we were talking about AI vs Human Generated content. One aspect is given how good AI content is getting, do we need to really write anymore?
Of course, there are two issues: inaccurate information and the human experience.
Inaccurate Information
AI still has an issue with generating inaccurate information. This is partially because AI tools are most often trained on Internet content. Since anyone can post to the Internet, there is no way to verify ensure the data is correct without lots of manual edits. Additionally, besides bad data, there is lots of garbage on the Internet – which can take the form of misogyny, racism, antisemitism, etc.
… but that’s nothing compared to the power of experience which AI cannot give you.
Experiences and the Human
I told the story of one of my high school teachers, who spent over 30 years in the Navy before retiring to become a teacher. In college, he had a test in an art class where he was asked to describe a certain painting.
The other students wrote about the what they had read in the book and listened to the lectures. They could tell you where it was painted, who painted it, and when. They could explain the technique used, and various other facts. This is the same as what AI can do – regurgitate information, without experience.
However, my instructor, on one of his shore leaves, had visited the museum where that painting hung.
My instructor wrote about seeing the painting with his own eyes. How the colors in the book were not the same as what you can see in real life. The emotions he felt as he walked up to the painting after having to wait in line as people who were also there to see the painting because of it’s popularity, and how it fit in with the other paintings around it. Instead of writing about what he knew, he wrote about what he felt.
These experiences cannot be recreated by AI. No matter how good AI gets, it can’t recreate those emotive feelings.
While pure factual information is fine for many situations, there are other situations where being able to provide a first person perspective is important. This is the why having the ability to write is still so important. We cannot simply allow AI to do things for us.
This is why it is important to experience things, as well as just learn about them.
AI vs Human Generated Content was originally found on Access 2 Learn
