An AI Skeptic’s 10 Simple Rules For Productive and Ethical AI Usage

Working through The New Age.

Over my travels of the last month, I have had two separate moments in which I have caught myself going on some sort of rant — to perfectly nice people who just happened to mention offhandedly that they occasionally use ChatGPT — about the evils of AI. I was halfway through the rants before I even realized they were happening; they just sort of came out of me, like a reflex, or maybe a burp. Each of these people were nice, thoughtful people, and they were kinder and more polite in response to my rants than I probably deserved. But their overarching attitude, if I’m being honest, was one of a bemused pity, like they were watching a guy still insisting on watching all his movies on laserdisc. A guy who was about to be left behind.

Now, as I’ve gotten older, I have become more and more comfortable with not embracing what the current trends may be, perfectly happy to simply enjoy the things that I enjoy. I’m always the last person to see the new TV show, I still use a Yahoo account, I type everything in Microsoft Word, I keep a handy scorebook at baseball games. In many ways, I’ve been a 50-year-old man for a couple of decades now. And I do still believe, as I wrote here just a few weeks ago, that AI is corrosive piracy, as well as an abdication of what it means…