Written by Terry Manning
First of all, I don’t hate artificial intelligence.
I have to remind myself and others of that from time to time. If you look at my social media posts, you’ll see that’s not the case.
I’ve been sharing articles and short videos of people across my platforms explaining how AI is messing with our ability to think and evaluate, fooling the discoveries we make when trying to create things, and generally making our brains as flabby as the rest of our bodies.
But no, I don’t hate artificial intelligence. I use it too often to reject it completely.
Everything I write is the result of a long process, the speed of which depends on my inability to type. Hunt-and-peck is a generous way of describing the painstaking process in which I type, type, type, pause, review, delete, retype, and repeat until I’m done or I get bored.
My typing class in high school was in conflict with AP English (which is ironic), so I never took it. I was disappointed in that until I learned that my former boss, Colin Holt Sawyer, had a Ph.D. You can become a successful crime novelist without learning traditional typing methods.
My thoughts, words, and the way I structure it to share it with others are all mine, but I use AI to find and correct mistakes. I like Grammarly because, unlike other software, it points out my mistakes without suggesting I completely rewrite what I’m trying to say.
I use artificial intelligence when editing photos taken with a digital camera. My basic stance is not to use Adobe Photoshop to do things that couldn’t be done in the darkroom days (cropping, exposure adjustment, dodging, etc.). You can manually select textures from one part of the photo to hide unwanted intrusions into other parts, but it’s much faster to leave that part to an AI tool.
A word of warning to my subjects: I’m not going to make everyone sitting in front of my lens look like a beauty pageant contestant, but Lightroom’s Enhance Portrait preset establishes a good starting point for retouching your photos. However, it has an annoying habit of making people with clean teeth look like they’re wearing dentures purchased from Temu.
This is why human intervention is needed, and I will intervene.
I use AI as a shortcut to get definitions or to tease out trivia. Alexa is a genius who can tell me that WNBA player Sato Sabally played college basketball at the University of Oregon before I can remember how to spell her name or type it into Google on my phone or laptop. We also see that she shaved her head as a sign of solidarity for a loved one undergoing cancer treatment, which is a very noble thing to do.
As my mom likes to say, Siri was on the other side of the door when she was teaching advanced skills at Virtual Assistant School, but she’s trying hard. She’s no Waze, but at least it’s good for timers and quick instructions here and there.
Starting with the previous paragraph, we will end this column using artificial intelligence. I’m a very slow typer, so using voice recognition on my laptop helps me get to the end. You still have to look over everything, but that little bit of support can make a big difference between quitting now or having to go back after a wash.
No, I don’t hate artificial intelligence per se.
I hate that it’s being marketed to us as if creating a caricature of ourselves on Facebook doesn’t have as much of an impact on the environment as scientists trying to fight HIV or world hunger.
I hate it when large data centers are forced onto minority, poor, white-dominated communities.
I hate the way billionaires try to convince us that it’s a replacement for human productivity. So it’s okay for billionaires to fire hundreds of thousands of real people from real jobs that they really need.
I hate how young people are abandoning themselves to embrace the discipline necessary to read, learn, create, and share their unique perspectives on the world.
I hate that its proponents tell everyone that homogeneity is fine.
I hate it when people say this is all inevitable and there’s no going back. Nothing in life is inevitable except death. It’s terrible to associate something you want to be liked with death.
Maybe we should ask AI to give us a better sales pitch.
ps I only found one grammatical mistake. Gold star for Terry!
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate who has worked as a journalist for 20 years. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
