Which Ends?

A new working paper suggests that there’s an imbalance in the benefits of working with artificial intelligence tools: some people get more out of them than others.

And while part of that segmentation has to do with ability—those with relatively less-developed writing skills will tend to get more out of using AI writing tools than someone who’s a great writer, for instance—part of what determines how much value we get from these things is the accuracy of our skill-related self-assessment.

So if we’re not great writers and we know we’re not great writers, we’ll tend to benefit significantly from AI writing tools, but if we’re not great writers and don’t realize it, we’ll tend to benefit less, possibly because we’ll take the advice these tools offer us less seriously.

Self-perception and calibration are fundamental to our use of any tool (or any source of knowledge and wisdom, really), as lacking the epistemic humility to seek out knowledge we’ll tend to find a lot less of it, and lacking a sense of our existing shape/status/capacity, we’ll tend to ineffectively incorporate that fresh understanding.

“To what end?” we might ask ourselves, as we attempt to suss out the utility of a new app or software suite or gadget. “How does this help me become a more refined version of myself?”

This is a useful question to ask even beyond raw utility, though, as it’s possible to apply these new capabilities, these tech-imbued powers toward ends that are maybe valuable in a very limited sense, but harmful in a much broader, longer-lasting manner.

We can use such tools to churn out endless (if nonsensical, incorrect, and/or regurgitative) content, for instance.

We can use it to help us bypass spam filters and create increasingly manipulative marketing messages.

We can use it to reinforce false narratives and spread misinformation.

None of these utilities or the tools that provide them are inherently negative, but many are currently optimized for personal (or business) gain at the expense of online communities and our larger communication channels.

When we consider using these sorts of tools, then, we might first ask ourselves which of the many ends we might pursue are worthy of our time, attention, and effort, keeping in mind the potential externalities associated with leveraging our newfound powers.

It’s tempting to ignore the secondary effects and potential net-negative impacts of our actions, but as our efforts are amplified by increasingly sophisticated and potent tools, this is arguably a vital first step along any new path we might take.

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