Opinion: A.I. Development Will do More Harm Than Good

By Ally Kling

In recent months, artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved and flourished. One year ago, all I could think A.I. was capable of was telling you driving directions and bringing you to your favorite TV channels, but now, it can do so much more. In 2023, A.I. currently has the power to write essays, songs, and scripts, and have a full conversation with its customer. These are just examples, and personally, I don’t think any of them benefit society.

Yesterday, on May 1^st, 2023, I was watching the news and they showed a clip of some of their anchors testing a new A.I. technology feature. With this feature, the anchors could type lyrics into a computer and tell the A.I. to sing the lyrics while imitating any music artist’s voice. This was a lighthearted clip, and everyone found it funny and amazing that they made it sound like Kanye West was singing “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s, but it brought me an array of moods and thoughts. What would happen if this became normal? What would we need real people for? If someone made a song with this software where one artist sang another artist’s song and put it on a streaming service, would the artist whose voice they used get in trouble? Even though this sort of A.I. is still early in development, I don’t think it should be pursued at all. If this becomes mainstream, what’s the point of real artists? We won’t need them, unfortunately.

Imagine in the year… let’s say 2040, if A.I. is society’s prominent way of assistance and entertainment. Not just in the music industry. We don’t need real people to make any type of art, we’ve had a robot doing that since 2023, and the sad part is, we gave that robot the power to be better at art than most people are. All of the world’s artists and those working in creative fields are either left unemployed or scrambling to find a new profession, because the man’s world doesn’t belong to man anymore. Additionally, those who work as cashiers and waiters aren’t really needed, because with artificial intelligence, the job can be done on a touch screen or by a moving robot who takes your order at a restaurant. Those who work in the writing field, such as journalists and authors, aren’t necessary either. Even in 2023, we had ChatGPT to write a whole novel for us in the matter of seconds. Overall, most humans are useless, and their ideas and skills are overlooked, because they will never top a hunk of metal and batteries that are doing the job that people were meant to have.

Is A.I. really worth it? Right now, it’s for convenience, but soon, it will disrupt the success of the human race. I strongly encourage all you to refrain from praising A.I., because it will soon have too much power if it continues to be used to complete processes that should be completed by real people. Some may say that A.I. is handy to do things like simple math problems, ask for directions, and find fun facts, but I believe that it shouldn’t go that far past that.