Out of Balance

Joseph de Weck’s case against AI

There is some hope still, isn’t there? As long as there are people out there like Joseph de Weck who wrote a piece for The Guardian dated Dec. 26. “This summer, I found myself battling through traffic in the sweltering streets of Marseille. At a crossing, my friend in the passenger seat told me to turn right toward a spot known for its fish soup. But the navigation app Waze instructed us to go straight. Tired, and with the Renault feeling like a sauna on wheels, I followed Waze’s advice. Moments later, we were stuck at a construction site. A trivial moment maybe. But one that captures perhaps the defining question of our era, in which technology touches nearly every aspect of our lives: who do we trust more–other human beings and our own instincts, or the machine?”

de Weck then goes on to introduce us to Immanuel Kant and his famous essay, “What is Enlightenment?” And its clear and unequivocal answer: Enlightenment is the escape from tutelage.” As Kant puts it, enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity or “nonage”. And further defines immaturity or nonage as “the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” And so this moment the culture had arrived at, 1784, represents an epochal moment. For the first time, it was possible, utilizing the advances in philosophy and the sciences in general, to escape from tutelage for a sizeable contingent of the educated classes. The ancien regime had suffered a fundamental collapse with the end of the old French aristocracy and there was no going back. No longer would the Great Chain of Being buttress the sickening prerogatives of primogeniture and all the other atavisms of the soul. We thought we had it made. Now the new battle-cry, “Sapere aude!” (“Have courage to use your own understanding!”) would resound through the streets of the capitals of the world. But darkness has its way of seeping into those areas we thought were lit permanently.

It is ultimately a question of Authority with a capital A. I define Authority as that force which does not admit of interrogation. de Weck: “Artificial intelligence threatens to become our new “Other”–a silent authority that guides our thoughts and actions. We are in danger of ceding the hard-won courage to think for ourselves–and this time, not to gods or kings, but to code.” He then talks about some statistics that should curl the hair on the back of everyone’s necks. This year, only three years after the launching of Chat GPT, “82% of respondents had used AI in the previous 6 months.” In large numbers, People are turning to the machine for advice.

But this is not a new phenomenon. We can go all the way back to 1976 to the work of Joseph Weizenbaum, whose epochal work Computer Power and Human Reason articulated the new possibilities. A few years before, he had devised the computer program ELIZA, which was modeled after the back and forth in the clinical setting of a Rogerian psychotherapist. “ELIZA was a program consisting of manly of general methods for analyzing sentences and sentence fragments, locating so-called keywords in texts, assembling sentences from fragments, and so on. It had, in other words, no built-in contextual framework or universe of discourse.This was supplied by a “script”. In a sense ELIZA was an actress who commanded a set of techniques but who had nothing of her own to say. The script, in turn, was a set of rules which permitted the actor to improvise on whatever resources it provided…ELIZA created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it.” And even then, fifty years ago, people were treating ELIZA as a real personage, investing it with a veritable spiritual presence, a human presence.

de Weck goes so far as to maintain that AI, given the current trends, is on the way to eliminating the perceived need for self-examination by writing. He quotes Joan Didion, who said that she writes “entirely to find out what I am thinking.” That’s a little murkily put, but I believe I understand her basic point. I personally write not to find out what I am thinking but what I believe as a considered enterprise, existing underneath the more immediate and superficial elements which pass through my mind. For example, one could pose such a question to oneself as “Do the ends justify the means?” You could ask some Authority to help you with such a difficult question, but perhaps that would lead to adopting a viewpoint that is not really your own. I would suggest that above all, don’t seek Adolph Hitler’s advice on this point.

So de Weck, worryingly, suggests that the answer is “yes”, yes, we start to stop wishing to find out what we are thinking when AI informs too much of our writing. Apparently there are electroencephalography studies. They show, according to de Weck, that those who rely on AI in their writing “showed the lowest cognitive activity and struggled to accurately quote their work. Perhaps the most concerning was that over a couple of months, participants in the AI group became increasingly lazy, copying entire blocks of text in their essays.” Then de Weck takes us back to Kant’s “What is enlightenment?” “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.’ [italics mine–dw]. It is a burden to decide to think for yourself. Why not take the easy way out and just let subordination wash over you? It’s so easy…other have thought these things out far better than you could ever do. Just leave the driving to us!

de Weck closes his essay with a question–“How can we harness AI’s promise of superhuman intelligence without eroding human reasoning, the cornerstone of the Enlightenment and of liberal democracy itself?” It seems to me that the answer to this question, even at this early stage in AI’s evolution, is that you can’t.