Verifying My Humanity: AI and Imitation Versus Creation

I was attempt­ing to buy con­cert tick­ets on Ticketmaster recent­ly, a moment that always enrages and frus­trates me. How in the hell do my $98 seats sud­den­ly cost $147? Today, a new and equal­ly mad­den­ing prob­lem arose when I could not con­vince my lap­top that I was a human being. 

My oppo­nent to great seats was not only my bank account, but reCAPTCHA, that smug lit­tle box that auda­cious­ly demand­ed I prove my exis­tence. The rid­dle this Sphinx Bot gave me con­cerned traf­fic lights, using images tak­en by what I assume was a mal­func­tion­ing Google Street View cam­era. When I missed two tries in a row (is the lit­tle line in the cor­ner of that box attached to that street­light? Who knows?), I was told, “can­not ver­i­fy your human­i­ty.”

By the time I passed (this time click­ing all the box­es that showed motor­cy­cles), I was told that my tick­ets had been pur­chased by anoth­er per­son, and I was shunt­ed back into the queue. Blurg!

I under­stand that AI can be ben­e­fi­cial. AI can auto­mate repet­i­tive tasks and assist in lan­guage trans­la­tion. It can help doc­tors detect dis­eases with pin­point accu­ra­cy and allow farm­ers to mon­i­tor crops through drone data analy­sis. It might even final­ly give us the safe, self-dri­ving cars we’ve been promised for so long. 

I’m no Luddite. I own a phone and a lap­top (that’s me in the pho­to, writ­ing a Monday Motivation), use social media and email. Sharing memes is my per­son­al love lan­guage. But am I the only one who doesn’t think every sin­gle prob­lem needs to be fixed with an algo­rithm? Who would rather speak with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive than the ChatBot? Who is straight-up scared of Alexa? Who is not ful­ly enam­ored with AI? 

The dan­gers of AI are no longer sci­ence fic­tion. They are real, tan­gi­ble, and unfold­ing in real time. Algorithms often decide who gets a loan, a job, or even parole. Facial recog­ni­tion sys­tems misiden­ti­fy peo­ple of col­or at alarm­ing­ly high rates. It’s esti­mat­ed some 40% of social media con­tent is cre­at­ed by AI. Deepfakes blur the line between truth and false­hood, threat­en­ing democ­ra­cy itself (Abrego Garcia’s tat­tooed knuck­les, anyone?)

The guardrails of safe­ty, ethics, and account­abil­i­ty often fall by the way­side in the pur­suit of prof­it and timesaving. 

I can no longer even write my Monday Motivations with­out Labs (Google’s ChatGPT coun­ter­part) offer­ing their help me write prompt. And the sim­ple act of shar­ing my writ­ing on Facebook means Meta is using it to scale and improve AI. They are using my soul’s pur­pose to improve their tech­no­log­i­cal pat­terns. 

And don’t get me start­ed on the eco­log­i­cal impact of AI. That’s a piece for anoth­er day, but you can prob­a­bly guess that AI is unbe­liev­ably resource intensive. 

Is there any­thing left that belongs sole­ly to humans? I believe there are still realms machines can­not reach. Not because they lack intel­li­gence, but because they lack a soul. 

AI is imi­ta­tion. I’m con­cerned with cre­ation. Techno-Philosopher Gray Scott can respect­ful­ly take a long walk off a short pier.

Art — real art — is not about pre­ci­sion or pol­ish, but about hon­esty and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. It is a trem­bling whis­per of truth, a cry from the depths of joy or sor­row. Art bleeds and aches. It remem­bers the smell of your child­hood kitchen on Thanksgiving morn­ing and the deaf­en­ing silence of a crowd­ed room when you nursed your first bro­ken heart. These are not data points, but moments lived and offered in a way that calls to oth­er human hearts.

So let the machines assist us. Let them inspire us, chal­lenge us, and amuse us. But let us not hand them the pen when the soul is required. We do not need machines to ver­i­fy our humanity.