If humans prefer the writing of AI to that of humans, will they stop writing? If AI does most of our writing, will we stop thinking and go into cognitive decline?
Will people be motivated to write original content anymore? ” that I have designed with some colleagues for long-term systematic investing. The bot is designed to think like my colleague and valuation guru, Aswath Damodaran, whosecommentaries have received over 30 million views.
This gave rise to a discussion about what would happen to the market if the AI bot gets so good that everyone trusts it to make their investment decisions. In such a world, would the AI become the market?good, to the point that everyone trusts it to make the right decisions.
My current thinking is that while the DBOT may become very good at making such decisions, its more obvious impact lies in making previously impossible things feasible, like enabling a human analyst to create and analyze multiple scenarios instantly for every company in the S&P 500. For example, an analyst might want to consider how scenarios involving different regulatory and tariff regimes would impact technology companies. Such a task would take months or years without the bot.
In other words, the AI enables new kinds of work that one could not even contemplate doing without it because of the astronomical costs involved in doing it manually. This is already happening for many routine tasks. Virtually everyone is already using AI to create slick presentations and reports requiring heavy research that would have been impossible to contemplate until now. Indeed, generating this kind of “novel” content from prompts is one of the killer apps of AI.
The outputs can be so good that even the AI can’t tell whether it was created by a human or the machine. Which raises the obvious question: what does it mean to be human anymore? So far, the machine has learned everything about the world from original human generated content.
But now that it is so good at writing, will humans feel motivated to evenWhen I was writing my book, people would ask me half-jokingly whether I was using ChatGPT to write it. But they’re not joking anymore.of AI trained on copyrighted books over expert human writers.
In a controlled experiment by the authors, people compared short passages written by expert human authors that mimicked 50 iconic award-winning authors with those written by an AI that had been “fine-tuned” on the original work of those iconic authors. As a parenthetical note for readers not familiar with fine-tuning, an instance of it is the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback , in which humans guide the AI, altering its internal parameters to produce responses that are not racist, sexist, or X-ist, where “X” is anything that the human enforcers consider offensive.
Without such guardrails, the AI’s behavior could be very jarring since it has learned everything about us, including our dark side. Readers preferred the AI versions to the expert human imitations. People were also unable to distinguish between the writing of the humans and the writing of AI. It turns out that fine-tuning an LLM on a specific author’s work frees the chatbot from the shackles of its sycophancy and Northern Californian etiquette that results from the RLHF.
In retrospect, the result of the experiment isn’t altogether surprising. After all, what chance does an author stand against a machine that has been trained on the collectiveof humanity available on the Internet and then fine-tuned on a specific author?
The AI is able to combine this collective wisdom with the works of a specific author to produce something even better—as judged by humans—than what the author would write. The larger question that this raises is whether any content will be uniquely human anymore, or whether we are becoming fused with the AI and have, in a sense, already become a hybrid species shaped by the machine.
After all, if humans prefer the AI’s quality, why will they write anything original anymore, knowing that humans will prefer an AI version? Arguably, we are already seeing this phenomenon play out in science in a somewhat disturbing way. Books and research articles submitted to journals are being increasingly written or assisted by AI. Referees review them using AI.
Editors use the AI to write their reports. In effect, AI is writing original content and reviewing it, with humans providing some marginal fodder along the way. AI is becoming the producer and gatekeeper of human expression. Geoff Hinton noted that the AI “thinks differently” than we do.
But AI machines are getting to the point that we are allowing them to think more and moreus. And even when they think with us, the question we have to ask is whether the outputs are ours or the machine’s. And if it is the machine’s, are we heading towards a homogenization of humans, who will increasingly gravitate towards AI-induced expression, and thus everyone will begin to sound the same?
I remember the first time I heard someone in India say “no worries,” an expression I had always associated with Australians, or “chill dude,” a California classic. And I remember my hitchhike from Kabul to London in 1976, during a time when languages and customs changed markedly every couple of hundred miles. AI is likely to eliminate that diversity.
It blows my mind to think of kids in Kabul or Tehran saying “chill dude” or versions of it driven by a Farsi- or Pashto-based LLM. Another question comes to mind about what it means to be human going forward. If purely human writing bites the dust, will feelings be the only thing left that is uniquely human?
And what happens when the machine learns to simulate those as well, with all the right facial expressions, intonations, and even touch, which, in any case, will not be completely human anymore, since it will be shaped by the machine. This would be a brave new world that neither Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could imagine.
We need to think seriously about the risks of being so disarmed and enchanted by AI that we stop thinking altogether and our mental muscle disappears. is a distinguished professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at New York University, and the author ofSelf Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back?
Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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