Every month, youtuber Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a phenomenon typical of the times. This month, he tackles the challenges of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives. Already. It has lodged itself at the very heart of our practices, particularly editorial ones. In an article published in New Yorker on June 30 , writer Hua Hsu, himself a teacher, questions the usefulness of still teaching English at a time when more and more students are entrusting AI with the task of «writing» their texts. Yet, as he rightly notes, it's precisely because AI is disrupting our discursive habits that writing is more important than ever.
It's a general fact: artificial intelligence has the accidental virtue of bringing to light what man has in his own right. And despite appearances - the appearance of speech, the appearance of understanding, the appearance of thought - AI does not speak, write or think. That's our domain, forever inviolable.
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The ability to produce authentic discourse will become ever more valuable as the use of AI expands. We're already at the stage where ChatGPT rhetoric recognizes itself as such, and machine-written content immediately loses the value of being too obviously what it is: the’output of a «prompt». It sounds bad and it's good.
What's at stake goes beyond originality. Our dignity and intelligence are at stake. The cult of efficiency makes us lose sight of the very reason why we exist and of our agentivity. We become «efficient» by achieving the paradox of doing a lot while doing nothing, and not really knowing why we're doing it.
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Hua Hsu reports a study in which 58% of students in English from two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the incipit of a Dickens book that they were unable to read the entire work on their own. That's the price of ’efficiency«. A literature teacher explained to me the other day that students are more and more keen on summaries, that they avoid reading works in their entirety and seek to make the least effort for maximum success. They clearly don't realize the absurdity of their approach, and are content to parrot the superfluous.
It seems to me that there's a certain link between the reign of the image and the success of AI. Because, through the shortcuts it allows, it sanctions the primacy of appearance over being. You'd think I'd written this; you'd think I'd mastered the subject. And the individual, driven by this ideal of performance where the path doesn't matter as long as it's short, accommodates this deception of himself without batting an eyelid. This question then becomes an ethical problem, and not primarily an ethical problem with regard to the recipients who would be fooled by the machine's prowess. No, it's first and foremost a problem of personal ethics: what happens to me when I'm prepared to use any means necessary to achieve my ends?
What do I become when I abdicate the faculty that constructs my moral and symbolic universe, forges my identity and nurtures my relationship with the world? the word?
The trainer Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a social phenomenon in each issue. Watch his videos on the YouTube channel «La Cartouche».
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