Meerkat Prompts: Feelings on AI
The other day, I put a call out on social media for prompt inspiration. One of the Meerkats of Twitter provided me with an idea, asking what my thoughts are on AI.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I freely admit to using AI art generators. Virtually all the meerkat ‘art’ on this site comes from such sources. I don’t take any great joy in this, but I cannot afford to commission people to draw for me, my personal art skills are dubious at best, and yet I still want to express myself. On the other hand, as an author, I can appreciate the perils of AI, and cannot conceive of how any author would use AI to write a book or story for them. It would feel incredibly lazy on my part to use AI to write one of my books.
Does this make me a hypocrite? I dare say it does. I can live with this, even if it’s an uncomfortable juxtaposition.
I can see why people have concerns about AI. Might it come to impact job security in certain fields? It could be argued that automation has already affected employment in some industries, such as assembly lines. Businesses – some at least – always desire the means to cut costs, and removing humans, with their inconvenient need to rest, eat etc (to say nothing of wages), would greatly improve profits. For me personally, my job role should be quite safe from AI, seeing as I work in a showroom, as a sales consultant, but what of office-based roles in administration, or data entry? How long before AI reaches a stage where these jobs can be automated, and what becomes of the displaced human workforce?
As with any technological development, AI is a tool, and how that tool is wielded will determine what we think of it. Sci-fi loves to create doomsday scenarios about sentient AI (The Terminator and Matrix franchises come to mind), but the reality is always somewhat different. Human desires and needs will influence its development, and shape its impact. With luck, smarter minds than mine will regulate it and control it. With luck, we will find a way for it to benefit humanity.
