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Gen Z must understand nuance in the age of AI

It’s important to try and develop as robust and multi-faceted views about artificial intelligence (AI) as we can

As Gen-Zers are the first digital natives, I find that we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be a little more vocal in our support or opposition for causes that relate to the Internet and technology. And just like with ongoing geopolitical crises that everyone has an opinion on — even when they say they don’t — or climate change, it’s important to try and develop as robust and multi-faceted views about artificial intelligence (AI) as we can.

A little over a month ago I talked about hyper-advanced technology and how it isn’t showing the results or benefits promised by their creators. This is how I feel about AI — be it a generative text bot that violates what it means to have intellectual property and personal creative product, or identify the most efficient or effective targets of disinformation, or surveillance, and assassination.

That being said, when I do my job in the day to day, AI doesn’t do much except sort the traffic key performance indicators of stories or monitor the writing style of a given piece of copy. It generally feels like, though we keep getting closer to crossing the AI Rubicon, we still haven’t and it’s still making lives easier. I can’t say what it will be, nor do I believe I’ll be able to call it out when it happens, but we’re still approaching a plateau. Whether it’s manufacturing or food service or custodial services, or editing the news so more of it can be written, only for newsrooms’ ever-tenuous funding to get cut and redistributed so a robot can take five or 10 or 20 writing jobs.

I will always happily play into the ‘slippery slope’ end of the spectrum of opinions. I don't need to understand how a large language model (LLM) works to know that it can take my job as much through the slow but steady removal of my duties as the innovations of the office can now be found in a phone that fits in the palm of my hand.

So, for all those reasons, it’s frustrating when there’s someone my age plus or minus five years — Millennials, you need to pay attention — who reacts to AI like those panhandling investment bankers that lost billions because they thought the Internet was just a fad. There is not a job that someone isn’t going to try and take from you to give to an AI of some sort, and everyone should know that.

That’s all my opinion. If you disagree with me, fine, but give me something in return. “Oh, but look at this cool art/puzzle/line of code” an LLM made for me. Cool, great. You could have hired a human. You should have.

This all plays into productivity culture as well, but for arguments’ sake, if you had a robot do it for whatever reason, you would have saved more time and money, and been happier and more personally and professionally fulfilled, if you hired an artist or cryptographer or software engineer to do it for you.

Why? Because people can understand nuance, and they can learn and grow and offer feedback, not a binary answer. An AI only knows what it is told, while you can engage with a person. They can pay attention to your tone of voice and emotional state as you discuss the problem you’re facing or reason for hiring, and they can know subconsciously or consciously where their focus is truly needed.

That’s the digital frontier that I mentioned last column. Not AI itself, putting aside the moral and metaphysical implications of creating new life, but as with any new technology, understanding how to use it properly.

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