Why I Fear AI

AND MAYBE YOU SHOULD TOO. ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A CREATIVE TYPE

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

A recent New York Times story tells of two voice actors, Linnea Sage and Paul Skye Lehrman, who were stunned to hear his A.I.-stolen voice coming from a podcast. They’re suing. The case is being reported elsewhere, amid theories of potential satisfaction for the couple — or not.

Nobody wants to clone my voice. Whew. Although I still do public talks and presentations, mainly on end of life issues for a nonprofit I support, my voice is old and raspy and revered primarily by my children, who advise me to think of it as sexy. (Good luck with that, Fran.) 

But my words? Trillions of them are out there in cyberspace. A.I.’s for the taking. And the world population’s for the using.

Granted, probably not many people want to clone my words either. But I have worked extremely hard, over many decades as a reporter, essayist, author, speech-writer, blogger, you name it, to put them together in a fashion that hopefully provides information, entertainment and — most importantly — Truth.

A.I. does not recognize truth. Nor does it recognize empathy, persuasion or compassion, among other valuable emotional traits.

If you’re a writer, you probably seek to build a reputation (or not) for writing truth. It doesn’t come easy. It comes by slogging through data and proven facts to create sentences and paragraphs that express truth. While you’re at it you very likely watch facial expressions in interviews, or take notice of things like the scent of flowers and forests, the mysterious elegance of a foggy morning, the mood of a crowd, the brilliance of a summer sky. Then you put it all together in words that ring true.

A.I. just takes words and puts them all together. How do you think ChatGPT writes those fine job applications or school essays? By grabbing the words someone else has sweated blood to put together.

I like to think that occasionally, over the decades, I have put together a sentence or phrase that is singularly expressive. It’s surely not going to hurt my feelings for ChatGPT to grab it for an application essay. But how about you writers just starting out, or mid-career? Once you’re paid (or not) to create effective, even borderline unique (if such a classification exists) phrases, should you not care that you’re sucked into the content provider abyss and ChatGPT gets the glory?

As much as it fails to distinguish between truth and falsehood, A.I.’s inability to know empathy or compassion gives me pause.

Voice actors Sage and Lehrman presumably built their careers on the ability to show traits like these through their vocal expressions. That ability is partly a gift, but largely a learning process. I don’t know Sage or Lehrman, but I’d guess they have invested a great deal of time and effort into perfecting ways of expressing emotions like these. A.I. just grabs and spits out.

I have a book of short stories on Audible, recorded by a professional actress who was aging out of stage work and into book readings. Though it’s still a little jarring to hear my words in accents and inflections I might not have intended, I appreciate the long, hard work that the gifted Katherine Conklin devoted to this project.

Introduced through a mutual friend, Katherine won my own friendship, and admiration, by the time the book was done. Early on, when I explained that the Central Virginia accent of the characters in these stories was not as ‘deep south’ as the accent she was using to read them, she found an interview by a radio personality in Henrico County, VA, next door to the Hanover County of my childhood, and sent it to me for reference. Another time, when struggling to communicate exactly what I’d meant by one phrase, she sent a voice recording repeating it six times with different inflections.

I’ve no idea how hard other readers work to produce the audiobooks I enjoy on daily walks, and I know they’re paid. But their voices are now floating around in the ethersphere and are A.I.’s for the taking; no hard working voice actor gets a penny.

It’s not just about the money. What creators slave over to express are the emotions and values with which they embue their words.  

I don’t want just to tell truth. I want to amuse or lift spirits, to comfort or console, to persuade. These are things words can do, but only when the wordsmith writes, rewrites and rewrites some more until, hopefully, the words fit together to evoke a desired result.

I am quick to admit the limitless potential of A.I. in fields like technology, medicine, ecology and many others. But it is artificial. Human intelligence, one would hope, will always incorporate the basic elements of humanity like those above. Empathy. Compassion. Truth.

And that, my right-brained friends, is why I worry.