ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

 


Recently in Flanders, a newly appointed university rector delivered her opening address at the start of the academic year. To add some sparkle, she had relied on AI-generated quotes from renowned thinkers. Unfortunately, the model didn’t just get things wrong — it fabricated them entirely. Albert Einstein never said that “dogma is the enemy of progress.” The other quotes turned out to be equally fictitious. AI hallucinations, loosely based on what might sound plausible.

What made the incident particularly striking was that this very rector had previously warned about the dangers of AI during her election campaign: “We cannot blindly trust the output of AI tools.” Awkward, to say the least — especially for someone at the helm of a university, an institution where independent thinking should remain central and safeguarded.

Unsurprisingly, the use of AI tools is now being questioned. Rightly so — or not?

Artificial intelligence is still a young and developing technology, grappling with the usual teething problems that accompany innovation. The real challenge lies not in rejecting it, but in learning how to use it properly. Double-checking output seems a small price to pay — if only to prevent our own intelligence from drifting into hibernation. A body at rest, after all, prefers to stay at rest.

Perhaps it was even useful that a prominent figure tested the limits of AI so publicly. At the very least, it serves as a warning to students not to treat AI as an oracle. Nothing, so far, surpasses human intellect.

So should we give up on AI altogether? Should we throw this new technology overboard? An unequivocal no. That ship has sailed anyway. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it won’t crawl back in.

History shows that technologies which prove their value eventually become part of everyday life — from washing machines that spare us hours of labour to nail guns that improve speed and precision. Over time, we simply learn how to handle them properly.

And reading the manual never hurts.

Please note: no brain cells were damaged in the writing of this musing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 From Caesar to clickbait: writing lasts forever… What is truth, really? Is it something we all agree on — a kind of social contract? Or is it merely what each of us chooses to believe? Day after day we are bombarded with information presented as absolutely true: online, in news feeds, newspapers, comment sections, expert panels, you name it. Take climate science. I’m no scientist. Yet almost daily I stumble upon alarming articles predicting the end of the world due to global warming. How am I supposed to verify these claims, based on research models I’ve never seen and wouldn’t know how to interpret even if someone handed them to me? Does my ignorance make the predictions true? I’m no computer genius either. Still, I’m told that AI will do more harm than good. Once again, ignorance gets in the way and I’m expected to simply trust one of the countless experts. Hence my growing questions — and apprehensions — about the very concept of truth. We tend to believe what people with autho...
Read more

H3N2 and Me

Image
  H3N2 subclade K and I don’t get along. At all. Whether it qualifies as a super flu or not, it certainly isn’t superfly. Day five now, and I am thoroughly sick and tired of this bug. My bone structure appears to reject the tissues around it. My muscles have declared independence and now live lives of their own, refusing all calls to action. My throat feels lined with sandpaper. My brain seems to be testing the limits of my skull. And then there’s the constant, unpredictable switching between freezing cold and simmering hot — and back again. Sleep is impossible; the nagging pain simply won’t let go. I haven’t felt this miserable in decades. I had honestly forgotten this was still possible. I drift in some undefined dream state, somewhere between consciousness and oblivion. My attention span has shrunk to almost nothing — probably the worst part, since my brain is my only real asset. Now I can’t even hold a thought, let alone finish one. At first I tried to fight it. Useless. So for...
Read more

Rise, rise like a phoenix from the underground

Image
Over the years I’ve gotten to know many musicians in the local alternative scene . They work day jobs, rehearse at night, and play live whenever they can. All of them take their music seriously. None of them chose the easy path — they refused the mainstream, poppy sound. They gather a few thousand streams, sell some CDs and vinyl at a makeshift merch stand . They know mass success won’t come their way. And that’s fine. It probably never was the goal. The local scene runs on passion, not profit. But what if one of them did have what it takes to make it? Really make it. Success, being the fickle thing it is, often depends on right time, right place. Sometimes even on luck: one critic with some clout in the audience, one review picked up by a larger outlet, one celebrity namedropping. Quality and artistic value alone rarely cut it. It makes you wonder how much talent has gone unnoticed — not just among musicians, but across all the arts. Franz Kafka saw almost no success while alive. Vin...
Read more