If you have already gotten used to always choosing the convenience of AI, you might not like to hear what I’m about to say. However, if you also like the planet and your brain, you might want to keep on reading.
While AI is everywhere in our lives nowadays, I still remember a professor talked about it in class for the first time in 2023. The years that followed AI evolved and we were taught how to use it in a way that’s ethically and academically responsible, but there also were some more negative sides that were forgotten or ignored. Of course, AI can be helpful and efficient if it is used wisely, but the way AI is used today has more negative than positive side effects and no one seems to be talking about them. When I just started at university and a professor told the room that if we would not use AI, we would fall behind on the students who did use it. Now, I think it’s time to shift the narrative from looking down on those who don’t use AI to shaming those who use it for anything and everything
I thought we all knew about the impact of AI on our climate by now, but judging by the way some people use it, that information did not reach everyone’s algorithm. Let me repeat it quickly, since some people seem to have missed this information completely. A ‘conversation’ with AI uses approximately one bottle of water. That’s one bottle of drinkable water wasted every time you decide to choose AI over a quick internet search or a conversation with another human.
Attention for climate change has somehow sort of disappeared over the past few years though, so I guess that argument might not be very strong anymore. The rise of AI, however, is not only a threat to our climate, but also to our minds. While at first glance it might just seem to be making tasks easier, it’s actually taking our skills away. AI is making people forget how to critically read or analyse what they see, because people let AI do the thinking for them. At the same time, the internet is also being flooded with AI-generated content. This content is made to confuse people about what’s happening in the world and blur the lines between real and fake.
“While using AI might make your life easier for a while, it mostly makes you easier to deceive in the long run.”
A brain that has the answer to everything just a few seconds away, is so much easier to fool and deceive. When your brain never has to critically think, or try to understand something by reading it five times, or click through three webpages just to find an answer to a question, you lose your ability to think something through and you’re much more likely to fall for fake news. So, while using AI might make your life easier for a while, it mostly makes you easier to deceive in the long run.
So for the next assignment you don’t want to put time into, think twice (while you’re still able to) before you immediately turn to your favorite AI-companion. In a time of fake news and AI-generated content, critical thinking is one of the most important skills, make sure you don’t lose it to a machine. If you let AI do all your thinking for you, you won’t notice it when it starts fooling you into thinking something false is true or something true is false. And when you no longer know what to believe, it’s so much easier to trick you into believing anything.
Other than the fact that our only planet and our ability to critically think are being ruined by AI, using AI also has immediate effects on many people’s lives. In Sweden it might not be that visible, but in many other parts of the world AI data centres are visibly shaking up living conditions. The energy price is getting higher in the areas around datacentres because of how much energy they need and water reserves are running low because the water is being used to cool down these centres.
The content AI generates for you also doesn’t come out of nowhere. AI systems are trained on real peoples work, art, writing, and research without giving those people any compensation or credit. For you and your AI-helper, it might only take a few seconds to generate a certain artwork, but that’s based on many hours of work by lots of people.
By using AI for every question and task you have, you are not only contributing to the climate crisis, you’re also turning off your brain. Next time you are about to ask AI, please think about turning to a friend, a random blog, a magic 8 ball, a random 5-year-old, an oracle, or even Wikipedia first.
Writer: Louise Keymolen
