AI is reshaping journalism, warfare, education, and social life.

AI lacks human empathy and moral judgment, leading to ethical concerns about its usage in war.

AI has made human interaction less necessary, which can cause atrophy of critical thinking and social skills.

Since the end of 2022, when the first chatbot (ChatGPT) was introduced, we’ve progressed from a “machine” capable of human-like speech and writing to realistic videos of people with movie-star good looks whom some people fall in love with, only to learn, alas, that they exist solely in the realm of computer code.

Currently, AI is challenging some of our most basic notions. Based on AI’s increasing employment in areas such as journalism, war, education, and socialization, we have good reason to question the origin of anything we see, hear, or read. Is it human or AI?

If you want to see the inroads made by AI into journalism, pick up a copy of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s major newspaper. You’ll regularly encounter articles written by AI (although a final reading prior to publication is still tasked to human editors). Other papers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times, haven’t gone that far yet, but are already experimenting with interactive chatbots.

When you combine these early AI-friendly writing efforts with steady decreases in newspaper staffing (from 400 newsroom employees at The Plain Dealer in the late 1990s to about 70 today) it’s no surprise that newspaper readers and editors remain locked in a struggle weighing the need for more articles than the newspaper staff can create versus the clear preference readers have repeatedly expressed for human-written over AI-written journalism.

Like it or not, a new Informational Age is now dawning.

An early worry about chatbots involved whether developers might employ their versions of chatbots irresponsibly within a sensitive area like combat. But as things have turned out, it’s not the developers, but the U.S. government that has advocated the use of AI in ways that some AI developers consider unsafe. The recent standoff between Anthropic and the Defense Department illustrates the difficulties that can ensue.

The Pentagon demanded Anthropic should have........

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