Does AI Speak for You?
It wasn't there at the time…
This morning, the hotel I stayed in last week sent me an email, asking for a review. I clicked on the link in the email and my Browser (Firefox) took me to a web page where I typed in about 20 words of praise.
But I had inadvertently hit the “caps lock” key, so all the words were capitalized. I went to the edit menu to see if there was a way to easily transform the words to lower case.
What I found instead under “Writing Tools” was the ability to make my 20 words “More Professional, More Friendly, or More Concise.” Curious, I tried all three.
Somewhere in the bowels of Firefox, Artificial Intelligence rewrote my 20 words three different ways in three different voices, each very different than my own.
I see the allure. Turning the work of thinking and writing over to AI is easy. One might even say the opportunity to do so could provide better information to the hotel, in that a customer may be more likely to describe their experience if it was easier to do so.
I think there’s great risk, here. To begin with, I’ll paraphrase something my daughter told me about her refusal to use AI: “If I don’t do the work, how will I get better at doing the work?”
Secondly, I think AI, through my browser Firefox, is creating a filter for my impressions of the hotel. There is information in the words I choose and how I use them. Something is lost when AI substitutes its choices in place of mine. Bluntly stated, it’s not the same.
Could it be “better” in some ways? Certainly. The AI creation could be more articulate, have better sentence structure, seem more consistent through the “Professional, Friendly, or Concise” filters. And even though the actual respondent (me) could say “Yes! That’s what I meant!” about one of AI’s interpretations, I submit that what is lost is greater than what is gained by the hotel.
The hotel doesn’t learn what I feel, it learns what AI thinks I feel. It’s as if the hotel asked a friend of mine what I felt about the hotel, and the friend answered “(He feels) It was great,” or “(He feels) The service was great,” or “(He feels) The service was prompt and excellent.” Without the words of attribution or the quote marks.
Not my words. Not my nuance. Instead, a “sameness” created by an AI hidden in the web browser I used to access the survey. That “sameness” is the result of the parameters that guided the AI’s training and the data set on which it was trained. A single AI cannot capture the individuality of each and every guest of the hotel.
No, I didn’t have to use the AI “Writing Tool.” But we humans are often lazy, and as AI becomes more pervasive in our world, we will more often take paths that require the least effort. As we do so, our abilities to communicate and even to think critically will decline.
Soon, I fear, we will not recognize what we’ve lost by not doing the work ourselves, in terms of being able to do the work and the quality of information we provide. It’s not just the words but how those words reflect lived experience that’s important.
The hotelier wants to learn what I feel about my stay. That needs more than interpretation from an AI that’s never enjoyed fine restaurant dining served by an attentive waiter, or slid between fresh clean sheets, or dried off with a heavy but soft bath towel after a shower and before going out to explore a new city from a great central location.
I'm with your daughter.
From Jon Renner:
Erik: Although I agree with a good deal of what you say here, I also have to put forward the idea that even what the AI submits as a reflection of your own feelings about this hotel is far better than a series of questions which can be answered by filling in one of five or even 10 small circles.
And because of that, I think that it's a better choice for the hotel in trying to understand how their customers feel about their stay. In short, it may be imperfect, but it's better than what we settled for for many of our interactions right now.
I don't use these writing aids either, but then I'm an old guy. Pretty much set in my ways. And I still like two spaces after a period more than a single space. I haven't found a way to adjust the speech to text function on this phone to accomplish this kind of spacing, but if they ever make it available, I will certainly use it.
And then I think of how many old guys there are that's still write ... and the willingness of the people who are responsible for this feature to institute such a change. It seems pretty clear that I will be stuck with what I've got.
Jon