You wouldn’t drive while impaired, or you definitely shouldn’t.
Most of us understand impaired to mean “under the influence” of alcohol or drugs. It’s well established that a driver under the influence is far more likely to get into accidents and cause grievous or fatal harm. Countries have very strict laws around drink driving, and some have rigorous random testing programmes so there is a very real chance you’ll get caught if you drink and drive. It’s reinforced by advertisements and campaigns that make it clear: if you drink and drive, you are, as one ad campaign said, “a bloody idiot.”
Mobile phones are a huge cause of impaired driving these days. People are addicted to the streams of fluff rushing through their phones, and feel like they can’t take their hand off their device. It’s easy to observe this in practice, particularly if you’re on two wheels – cycling, motorcycling, or even scootering. Vehicle’s movements give it away – they are somehow just not right. We can also see inside the cars, spotting people clutching their devices like their life depends on it. It does, but not in a positive way, and unfortunately the lives of more vulnerable road users depends on it too.
We have a global addiction problem.
Luckily the same technology has come to the rescue, somewhat, for more modern cars, with driving assistance. Driver assistance devices can make a regular driver into a very good one, because you can focus more of your brain cycles on seeing what’s going on around you, and thinking about what’s coming next. This lowers your overall stress and allows you to drive further with the same amount of concentration. Car computers can also assist you in times of trouble. But sometimes they act in a very negative way, and you need to be alert and intervene when things go wobbly.
This is where distracted drivers get into trouble. As much as auto maker rhetoric might say automated driving is safer, it’s only safer if there’s an intelligent human overlord on top of everything, making sure that when there is an excursion away from what a sane driver would do, you have your hands on the wheel and can assert control. If you are not paying attention, then when that tool fails, and it can fail in weird and rapid ways, then you risk fatal harm to yourself and others.
So it’s obvious we should use assistive driving as a tool to help us become better drivers, but not use it as a tool to become a worse, even more distracted, driver.
Impaired Creation
I see the same pattern with large language models, which is assistive driving for work, thinking, writing, creating code or pictures, writing your Linked In posts, writing blog posts and also much more.
The output from LLMs can appear amazing, and sometimes it undoubtedly is. But it is not replacing you as a driver. It is merely assisting you. And the results will be terrifying if you are not genuinely in control.
ChatGPT and its ilk can spin out incredibly wonderful-looking text. Concise, precise-looking, well-structured, the right length because you can tell it to do that. When you skim read it, it appears fantastic.
And that’s the problem. Skimming it is pretty much all you can do. You can’t really read it, or at least I can’t.
It’s bland, impersonal, or if it’s personal, it’s fake. It has the personality of a stone, not from the heart, and it makes me cold reading it. Not that I read it, as I said above I find it almost impossible to read text generated from a large language model.
It’s good for creating fake content, content that you don’t expect people to actually read. But if you actually want to read something and have it go into your brain, and make you think, or make you make a decision, then you need something more than the automatic output from a model.
Like an assertive driver, a creative user of the AI tools can become incredibly powerful, extending their ability to create, to write well, to structure their thinking, or as a better search to find information and links, and get feedback.
So use the tools, but put them on the side of the screen, not the centre, and make your actual work your own. I enjoy hearing real voices, to read real content, and I also like content like this to be read by human eyes, not by another large language model summarising the content of the day.
How I wrote this: I dictated this into my phone, used AI to create an exact transcription, edited that by hand and in detail, and then went back and edited again a while later.
Lance Wiggs 