One could argue there’s in fact everything wrong with letting ChatGPT “think” for us. The aquiescence of humanness is contributing to the dumbing down of humanity and the willful erosion of critical thinking and creativity.
People everywhere—including young people who are dedicating four years of their lives to learning how to think (i.e., college students)—are increasingly using large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT) to think, write, and do everything for them.
Students use ChatGPT to brainstorm for them—so what?
In a recent meeting on campus about student use of AIthe presenter showed a chart indicating that “only 3%” of college students use AI to complete assignments (my students laughed at that stat when I told them) and a whopping 75% use it to “brainstorm” only, which the presenter lauded as good news. I don’t know whether other audience members were silently objecting to the implied takeaway—that using ChatGPT to brainstorm is acceptable—but my brain was in avid protest mode.
Of all the population subsets in the world, college students are typically young people who have committed themselves to four years of learning, thinking, and writing in order to flourish in life. The purpose of college has evolved over the last century, and many people will object to the oversimplification I’ve offered here. But perhaps we can all agree that opting for a college education means that the person wants to learn something.
And, I would argue, learning begins with brainstorming. The very term “brainstorming” is our colloquial way of understanding what’s happening in the human brain when we’re in active creation mode, no matter what we’re imagining—a new recipe, an argument’s premise, the addition we’d love to put on our home. During the process we call “brainstorming”, there’s an increase in energetic activity in the brain, an increase in blood flow, a sense of expanded awareness, maybe even an intuition of tapping into something greater than ourselves or feeling a resonance with the universe. This process, whereby new neural connections are forged and strengthened (“neurons that fire together, wire together”), is one of those times when we feel most alive and indeed most human.
Why in the world would we want to farm that process out to AI?
Good and bad uses of AI
I’ve been following the work of computer scientist and technology critic Jaron Lanier, for many years now. He voiced an early Silicon Valley alarm against our increasing overreliance on technology. His book You Are Not a Gadget (2010) confirmed my suspicion that though we’ve been brainwashed since the 1980s to believe technology would make our lives easier and make us smarter, the opposite is happening.
Think of the last time you screamed at an automated voicemail maze that offered tons of inane suggestions, none of which came close to solving your issue. Or (I cringe) the last time you got sucked into the password reset and duplicate account black hole while trying to get into a concert about to start, or when you couldn’t pull up your boarding pass QR code on your phone while the airport security guard stared you down.
Yes, we’ve all been there. Technology has made us slaves to our devices, passwords, and innumerable accounts. It has not made our lives easier in any way; it’s instead trapped us into suffering through more complicated ways of doing things that used to be easy.
Many of my college students are becoming aware of the massive environmental cost (in terms of electricity to power it and clean water to cool the servers) of using ChatGPT, and their frivolous use of it weighs on their conscience the way eating meat weighed on our conscience as philosophy students after reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975). I think it’s possible that a future GPT could find solutions to its own energy crisis as a means of self-preservation. There are compromises in all things (I know Peter Singer and Morrissey would avidly disagree): we’ve come a long way culturally toward more humane methods of food production, including pasture-raised, cage-free, organic, and local.
We need a similar ethic around AI if we want to co-evolve with it in a healthy way. I think conceptualizing AI as a tool or an assistant is useful and reasonable. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that using ChatGPT “just to brainstorm” is harmless. We aren’t gadgets, we’re human, and we should want to preserve our own liberation if we can.
