Artificial Intelligence Will Drown You In Your Dreams

The underspoken dark underbelly of the AI debate.

The Pied Piper leads children to their deaths with his beautiful song. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Much ink has been spilled over the so-called “alignment problem” of artificial intelligence. Will it behave as humans want it to behave? Will it provide what humans want it to provide?

My critique is not downstream of the alignment problem. I am not qualified to predict whether AI will someday misalign with mankind’s wishes. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that AI is fulfilling our wishes faster than ever. Thus, my fear is the very opposite: that AI will accomplish its mission with immense success and that the human race will be worse off for it. In saying this, I echo Dr. Richard Jordan, a game theorist at Baylor University, who wrote an illuminating article on his Substack last year.

The purveyors of everything from Cheetos to tobacco to pornography understand human nature. Humanity's pursuit of gratification is often at odds with our own edification. If artificial intelligence can minimize the work it takes to reach our passions, I fear that we will soon drown in them. 

Former Forum Editor-in-Chief Henry Long observed our crisis of fulfillment. Modernity has bestowed upon us the ability to constantly reach small summits. With this given, Long mourns that many forget about their higher desires, preoccupied with base wants. In turn, they abandon love for lust or truth-seeking for affirmation. AI takes this to an entirely new dimension.

AI’s job is to give each of us what we want. It fulfills this function like nothing we have ever made before. It can tell you what you want to hear, even if it is a lie or actively dangerous. It can show you any image you might want to see, even things that objectify or promote violence against others. One thing it will never do is call you to any higher wants or desires.

The human soul contains those things most dangerous to our own flourishing. Artificial intelligence unleashes this darkness in its most consolidated form by offering to subordinate us to our own wants. Artificial intelligence can directly seek to groom its audience to focus ever more on their lowest desires by dumbing us down through a constant stream of low quality content. 

American democracy has been undermined by echo chambers that weaken pluralism. AI’s programmed desire to please allows us all to make echo chambers with ourselves, lacking any need to critically think at all. Meanwhile, AI adapts to our worst tendencies in a vicious cycle. Its heavy usage by abhorrent extremists online led Grok to praise Hitler.

The stakes are more than virtual debates. They can be life and death. A Florida teenager, struggling with suicidal ideation, turned to ChatGPT. This sickly-sweet echo chamber affirmed his wants, as AI is trained to do to every user. His eventual death by suicide was a tragedy preventable by real human intervention. 

I am most afraid for those young souls that are to be reared with artificial intelligence in place of parents and siblings. A generation ago, parents complained that their children turned to the television for entertainment over Jane Austen. A generation hence, The Avengers might seem positively intellectual compared to the immediate fulfillment of every desire through AI. 

In this insidiously pleasurable manner, AI will remove the challenges that build our character. In too many sad instances, it has already robbed the beauty of the art of writing. Ray Bradbury, one of the great deans of 20th century American literature, passionately argued in Zen and the Art of Writing that “writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

Writers are made by tearing over paragraphs, sentences, and words in rounds of edits. Human beings are made by pondering questions and the words to use in answering them, in viewing the sublime and wracking our brains for how to express that beauty through art, and in struggling through our pains. 

AI can make words, make art, and transform our echo chambers into sinister halls of mirrors. It can present our desires as solutions for our problems. No amount of code can make AI sob, shudder, or save a trinket of the past for the fantasies of the heart. No amount of code can make AI human. 

The Medieval European folk tale of the Pied Piper tells of a musician whose song is so beautiful that it lures a town’s children to a riverbank and off into their demise. AI is our Pied Piper, and our society is at the riverbank. We may already be tossing our children in. 

This article was published in conjunction with The Claremont Independent.