I was reading a ‘suggested post’—that I don’t seem to be able to find again—where an academic suggested using AI to peer review manuscripts for journals.
We could be in the fantastic (sense imaginative, not meaning extraordinarily good) situation that an AI would write the manuscript, which would be peer reviewed by perhaps the same AI, published by a journal (for a high cost, of course) to be later read and summarised by an AI, to be “consumed” by a researcher or a student. I could not stop thinking ‘What would be the point of a system like this?’
On Christmas Eve I was running (just 30 minutes) while listening the audiobook version of Haruki Murakami’s “What I talk about when I talk about running“. He was discussing how we think by writing and rewriting, carefully choosing words to express what we want and how our thinking evolves by doing so. Or something like that, I was struggling with a sore thigh while listening to this. How far detached was this idea from the AI writing a manuscript, a report or an assignment!
Every time I write about this (here, for example) I’ve been told that ‘the cat is out of the bag’, ‘the genie is out of the bottle’, ‘toothpaste is out of the tube’… that the situation is irreversible. I don’t accept that premise, which is pushed by a small group of companies that are bleeding money and need to pump their stock price, so early investors exit with a high profit before the whole scheme collapses.
I discovered that am a Luddite, but not in the superficial sense of ‘opposed to technology’. I am curious about technology and an early adopter of Linux (1996), Python (1997), R (1998), Twitter (2006), etc. I am a Luddite in the sense that I question who is pushing for the reorganisation of what type of work done by whom and at what cost. And, at the end of the day, who wins?
Here I am, Ludditing (it should be a verb), writing/thinking aloud, hoping that we can figure out how to preserve our humanity when learning and when writing.
As Jacobim Mugatu said:
