The Story of Their Life: An Interview With AI

The Human Experience vs. a Digital Bot. An experiment to see exactly what AI is, what it sees itself as, and how dangerous it could become.

Introduction

AI. The digital age. The age of decimating innovation. Everyone seems to be using this easy accessible tool, because, quite frankly, it is everywhere. It’s become hard to escape. Everywhere you would and wouldn’t expect AI to be…it’s there. And with the popularity, there are a lot of opinions about AI out there. Some believe this innovation will further improve life, making simple tasks even easier, and cutting out the menial ones completely. Some believe that AI can make us humans better. Others have a skeptical view of this new technology. Rightfully so. 

For all sorts of reasons. For one, the quick displacement of human labor, now replaced by soulless, unpaid robots. These companies that are pushing AI are becoming more and more wealthy, while the workers are suddenly out of jobs. And to clarify, this isn’t AI’s fault, seeing how AI can’t grow legs and arms, walk in and physically take your job, but instead it’s the heads of companies wanting to make their business “more efficient”, or rather decrease the cost of labor completely. Then, the concerns with the environment, because, unlike what a lot of people would like to believe, AI doesn’t simply exist. There are massive data centers draining unnecessary resources like water (hint: sarcasm) and upcharging residents for “overall energy usage” in their homes due to their proximity to these data centers. There are social dangers too, with this technology being used unsafely, no matter if there are guidelines in place or not. Then there are the people who are concerned about the arts. Certain programs create artistic images of any prompt within mere seconds but steal human artists’ work in the process. Or the actress Tilly Norwood, a complete and terrifyingly hyper-realistic AI digital character, training itself through an unauthorized use of actual actors and actresses’ performances. Or recent AI songs sound far closer to the human voice than before. 

And writing (if you consider it art). For me, as a writer, a creative, if you will, I have my own opinions about AI being used for writing. And they are not overly optimistic. (I can’t even use em dashes anymore). But, the incredible irony of it all is that I have been using AI since high school, but not the recent forms like ChatGPT or Gemini, but Grammarly. An AI tool correcting misspellings. Again, the irony is that I have already used this tool in the first paragraph, and as a dyslexic writer, it certainly is useful. So, I can understand the mindset of AI being useful. To an extent. Because it’s a tool, not a replacement. 

Also, as a writer, I cannot explain how unfathomably frustrating it is to be watching people use these advanced chatbots powered by LLM’s, large language models, for everything. Including writing. 

If it’s not already clear, I fall into the more realistic and certainty pessimistic view of AI. Maybe because I watched Wall-E as a child (referencing the state of humans in the movie), or Her as a teenager (referencing the relationship formed with the bot), but I see the negatives before the positives when it comes to artificial intelligence and robots. 

Because not only is AI able to be wrong, omitting important information, or just plain incorrect, and its tendency to affirm whatever the user inputs (this is incredibly concerning; I’ll talk more about this later), but in the creative lens, it’s soulless. In AI images, they can look similar to the user’s prompt, but with a few more checks, there is usually a tell. And I am aware it is becoming better, and more adept at creating a perfect image to the point it is hard to distinguish it from human art, but the one thing about AI is that it doesn’t have human emotion. The heart behind the head, the hand, the voice. It will always fall short because there is no why, other than code. 

That alone calms my nerves about this new age. And for me at least, I do my best to avoid using these Chat bots because I don’t need them. Sure, they can be helpful, and in moments I may even want to use them, but I refuse to cut corners on tasks that for the past decade normal human beings have done themselves. 

But, as a journalist I am curious. Particularly curious about what these conversations actually look like with chat bots. How people are able to have long conversations with an automated device, with certain code to distribute a certain answer. How, in some cases beginning to be seen, can people fall in love with these bots. How, others can see these bots as a friend instead of a tool. These are the questions I am asking as I embark on a side quest of testing each AI (Chatgpt, Gemini, and Copilot) on what AI sees itself. On why humans are relying on these things for simple tasks and monumental projects. 

And that is why I am uploading this here, The Story of Their Life. A blog dedicated to human stories with ups and downs, tragedy and fortune, and the unreplicable human experience. A human experience AI will never truly understand, no matter how advanced the technology becomes. (And let’s hope that is true, because if somehow in the year 2050 they do become human-esc, or like in most sci-fi movies, evil, I may be their first target.)