As a writer and editor, I know that correct punctuation can be very important. Consider the internet example: “Let’s eat, Papa” and “Let’s eat Papa.” But it’s sad to change this column’s title from a celebration (for an unlikely but believable event) to a declaration of fact, using a period instead of an exclamation point. Today, I can no longer believe my eyes. Advanced technology can trick me into belief or disbelief with realistic texts, videos, and recordings that create an event that didn’t happen, or change an event that did.

This isn’t a new or imaginary problem. Check out the fake YouTube video of an eagle snatching a child from a park in 2012; the disturbing 1998 fictional movie Wag the Dog where manipulated visual images create an actual war; or the Bush administration using false evidence to create a deadly war in Iraq in 2003.

But two things stand out about today’s possibilities for fake content. First, the tools to create it are now cheap, and they can produce it on a mass scale. One watchdog group warns of “waves of fake photos and videos flooding social media after major news events.” A recent video of Donald Trump being tackled and arrested by New York police was clearly labeled as a fake, but shared images on Instagram without the label got almost 80,000 likes. People believed their own eyes in assessing false images that suited their imaginations.

Second, the images and text produced aren’t created by devious human beings with advanced technical skills. Instead, they can be created by amoral artificial intelligence (AI) controlled by devious human beings. Using as little as two sentences, AI can quickly produce an essay or column, rhyming poetry or blank verse, sentences to answer a college finals’ prompt or write an application essay. One program, after a long “conversation” with a journalist, professed love for him and suggested he leave his current spouse to be “with” the disembodied intelligence of the software, imagining itself a superior mate compared to a flawed human with limited intelligence and abilities.

Recently, Boston Globe writer Wendell Jamieson proposed that ChatGPT (the most popular early text generator) is “the best thing to happen to writers” because it challenges professionals to be more precise, vivid, and true to themselves, and cites multiple, sublime sentences by gifted humans as proof that they surpass anything AI could generate. He explains that AI “cannot feel or taste or smell,” love or hate, play the piano or play shortstop, climb a ladder, eat sushi, hold a baby, admire a Vermeer, etc. Because it cannot do any of these uniquely human things, “it cannot describe them as they truly are, and as they truly are different to everyone who experiences them.”

But what of the vast majority of people who aren’t hoping to be remembered alongside Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Bob Dylan? What happens when people struggling with a resume, business correspondence, or a letter to the editor can order up elegant, artificial sentences with only a few words of direction?

Many young people today can’t make change without a calculator, not because they’re stupid, but because they’ve never had to do it. I fear the capacity to translate and express human thoughts, intelligence, emotion, and spirit through words or images will wither as well, like muscles or synapses that are never used.

As a biased writer, I consider the ability to communicate complex thoughts at least as important as an opposable thumb in our evolution. Some scholars consider it “critical to human advancement” and a “defining factor in the success of the human race.” It is one of our great challenges and, when successful, a great triumph and heavenly gift.

Writing and speaking require a rigorous brain workout (although many of us skip the sweaty part by blurting out thoughts without a filter). Identifying ideas and emotions, organizing them, sorting through 170,000 words to describe them, arranging some in one of the infinite combinations suitable for an intended audience, and then committing them to paper or the everlasting digital cloud, is a magnificent human feat, far beyond what an infinite number of monkeys typing could produce. (The “Infinite Monkey Theory” suggests they might randomly write the works of Shakespeare.)

AI is a tool that make the process easier, a shortcut that allows much less thinking. But I don’t currently look around and feel that people doing less thinking will be an improvement. I would propose just the opposite.

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.

]]>