Two Reasons Why I'm Scared of Using AI

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.
--- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The line seems so apropos to me now.  I have an old hit tracker for my blog called StatCounter.  I no longer get a lot of hits on my blog, according to StatCounter, and the majority of the hits I do get are from bots of one kind or another.  Blogger gives it own stats regarding number of hits and typically reports an order of magnitude more of such hits.  It does give a geographic distribution for those hits, but it doesn't provide the info that StatCounter provides, which matches the reader's online address either to the particular post or otherwise to the blog in general.  Indeed, I know essentially nothing about those hits which Blogger reports but StatCounter doesn't register.  Are those from human beings or from bots?  I don't know.  Note that this is for activity of mine I do try to track, however feebly.  With the rest of my computer usage, however, I'm not trying to track anything.  The paranoia comes from the feeling that all those providers out there, as well as the nefarious players who operate behind the scenes, are trying to track me, either to sell me something that I really don't want, or to entrap me in a way that would create some personal damage, and inadvertently I give them information so they can do that.

That said, I do continue to write blog posts on occasion, post fairly frequently in Facebook, and write the occasional rhyme that is posted in BlueSky.  So, in spite of my paranoia, I am putting fodder out there and I should acknowledge that might be making things worse.   But I do exercise control in making that content.  Generally, I have my guard up then.  (There is a life lesson, don't write a post when you're very angry, which I've learned the hard way.)  It's those interactions where my guard is down that is of more concern.  I'd really prefer not being observed then.

However, I'm not a purist about it, for sure.  I use many of Google's services, including their search engine, which now features AI.  The convenience benefit from doing so lured me in and now the use is largely habitual.  Plus I've recently had chats with AI when that is providing online help for some service I use.  One instance was with my bank about an online banking issue I was having; another was with my coffee vendor about a delivery that hadn't yet been scheduled.  With the former, it didn't seem there was an alternative to talk with a human being and I needed the transaction to go through.  With the latter, I was hoping it would be quicker than my human communication had been in the past.  (It wasn't.)  I suspect that increasingly, paranoids like me will find that they can't be purists about this.  Nevertheless, they can significantly reduce their interactions with AI as compared with those who are fully engaged with it.  Does that matter?  I hope so, though I really don't know.

* * * * * 

Let me get to the other reason.  Over my lifetime, I've spent a significant amount of my thinking in producing a narrative of one sort or another.  Maybe it started even earlier, but I'm sure it happened in college, lying in bed at night, thinking about the meaning of life questions.  Then, I hardly wrote anything that wasn't a paper for some course.  Whatever externalizing I did was in conversation with friends.  Professional writing of research papers increased after I became an Assistant Professor, but while my set of friends changed completely (they were other Assistant Professors in Economics), I mainly didn't write papers with them, though I did have many conversations with them.  That all started in 1980.  I eventually did write papers with a few others, but that was work.  Conversation with my friends was my social life.

When I switched careers to Educational Technology, which started in the spring of 1996, I began having conversations with faculty around campus about online learning.  I really enjoyed those conversations.  It was the best part of the work.  In some sense, my blogging, which began 9 years later,  was my internalizing these conversations, but then producing some output from those internalizations that others could have a go at.  The writing happened because I didn't have friends I could share my thoughts with over coffee.  My peers then had similar positions as I had but were located at other universities.  This was before Skype was popularized and, since everyone was so busy, even if we had the technology available a one-on-one online meeting during working hours seemed a luxury we couldn't afford.  (After I retired, for a while I hosted ooVoo chats with a group of friends.  We called ourselves Grumpy Old Men of Ed Tech.)

In order to process a narrative, such as the one for this post, I will use external tools.  These include an online dictionary, if there is mention of a movie or two then I will often take IMDB.com as a source, and for more general information I used to access Wikipedia quite a bit.  Using these tools notwithstanding, I exercised full control of the narrative.  It reflected my thinking.  If, in contrast, I thought of AI not as such a tool but rather as a coauthor, would I want that, to surrender some control so as to get to ideas I wouldn't have come up with myself?  Is it egotistical on my part to say I prefer full control, even if I'm then limited by my own prior experience and reading?  

I must say that with this a good part is about worrying where to find the slippery slope, after which ceding control has gone too far.  Further, I'm someone who has had a variety of bad habits over my lifetime.  If ceding control over the narrative is initially challenging, but then continuing to cede control starts to become easy, might that turn into another bad habit for me, regarding less and less practice with reflective thought?  

I can imagine that my own diminished mental function would encourage a different answer than I gave above.  So, perhaps five or ten years out, I will be unabashed about using AI as a writing partner.  But I'm not there yet.  And, truthfully, I'd like to forestall that time for as long as possible.