AI Content - Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Any content I publish on this website is created without the use of AI tools - unless explicitly stated otherwise. The only exception is the use of AI for research or spell correction. Third party content, references, quotes, or other material not authored by me may contain AI generated elements.

Fear or hype?

Every generation panics when a new technology arrives. For Victorians, it was trains. For us, it’s AI. Since AI is a relatively recent technology, it’s difficult to assess what the risks are, and what constitues proper ose of these new and exiting tools. Some people predict that machines will replace lawyers, artists and coders. Others warn of world domination by a central mainframe or other dystopian scenarios. So it’s somewhere on the spectrum between hype and fear. Probably because these emotions sell best. Personally, I try to stay clear of both extremes. What serves me as an argument against them is what people speculated about other important new inventions, like the railway or the computer.

Victorian Railway Madness

When trains were first introduced and increasing in speed rapidly, some people believed that these incredible velocities could drive people insane.Atlas Obscura writes in “The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity”:

“As the railway grew more popular in the 1850s and 1860s, trains allowed travelers to move about with unprecedented speed and efficiency, cutting the length of travel time drastically. But according to the more fearful Victorians, these technological achievements came at the considerable cost of mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain.” In particular, the jarring motion of the train was alleged to unhinge the mind and either drive sane people mad or trigger violent outbursts from a latent “lunatic.” Mixed with the noise of the train car, it could, it was believed, shatter nerves.”

The origin of the Computer

The word computer originally referred to a person who performed manual computations. Many people, mostly women, were working in large rooms, crunching numbers.

Also with this invention a lot of people feared for losing their jobs. Yes — people are no longer employed as human computers, but I’d argue that many still perform similar tasks today, like working extensively with spreadsheets.

The Dream-Team

With these historical facts in mind, my conjecture is that we will use AI just as any other tool. Back to the example with computers, and calculators for that matter. It’s good to be able to calculate by hand and know the mathematical operations behind it. At the same time, we should definitely use the power of calculators to verify calculations, or do tedious and time consuming calculations faster.

A person without a calculator will have a much harder time competing with someone who uses one. At the same time, a calculator without a person deliberately using it and combining it with other tools is also not much of use. It needs a mathematician, an architect, or someone else with a specific need to be useful. So I believe this is also what AI will be used for in the future. Not as a replacement for the technician, but as another tool in his or her tool belt.

How to continue?

My university, ETH Zürich, had an approach I quite liked. For my thesis, they required all authors to disclose their use of AI tools. There were three options: No AI text, AI text disclosed as such, or undisclosed AI text. This approach is effective - it helps us to gather data on how people use the tools, how the usage is distributed, how do we feel about content depending on how much AI it contains. Which also lead me to my decision on how I treat AI content. As written above - unless stated explicitly, all the content is non-AI. What is your own approach to using AI tools?