The good and bad of machine learning | Letters

Murray Dale and Ignacio Landivar on the limits of artificial intelligence

Imogen West-Knights is absolutely right about us losing our brain power to the artificial intelligence bots (ChatGPT has its uses, but I still hate it – and I’ll tell you why). I too believe creative imagination is a muscle, which needs its exercise. She is also right that it can revolutionise scientific endeavour. My field of weather forecasting will soon be revolutionised by machine learning – a type of AI – where we recognise enough past weather patterns so that we can predict what weather will be coming. But writing best-man speeches, leaving speeches for work colleagues, letters to a dear friend? Do we really want to dissolve into brain-lazy folk who use AI to be the understudy to our own emotions?

If I say “I love you” to someone, would they like to hear it from me or a bot? There is also another concern: AI output has no audit trail, no clues to its source. Its source is the wild west. Anyone – good, bad, indifferent – can feed into it, program it, bias it. If, as you say Imogen, you do end up in the woods in an “analogue manner” with your ability to think intact, I’ll happily join you. Hopefully others will too.
Murray Dale
Hayle, Cornwall