How AI tempts the lazy mind
And yet with every turn — and now, every Google search — AI confronts us with slick yet forgettable summaries and confident, plausible confabulations. Cheerleaders for AI keep telling me that these fictions hardly ever happen any more. My own lying eyes tell me a different story.
To put it another way, the telephone makes superficial contact easy. That can be the beginning of a more meaningful human relationship, or it can be a replacement for it. Large language models offer the same temptation when it comes to gathering knowledge. A superficial survey becomes effortless. Do we let it catalyse deeper research and understanding? Or replace it?
The choice is ours. Put like that, it verges on being a moral question. We can easily imagine what Screwtape might have made of that.
