Pandora’s box is a story from Greek mythology focusing on Aphrodites’s husband, Hephaestus, the Greek God of inventing, and his creation of a box of plagues, containing both illnesses mental and physical alike. Although Zeus, god of lightning and king of gods warned the fair maiden named Pandora to keep away, she let her curiosity get the best of her, causing all of the time sins to be unleashed onto the world, cursing humans for the rest of their days. In modern times, an invention created by man that many believe has the capability of digging humanity into an inevitable hole of chaos and destruction is Artificial Intelligence.
Since the initial coining of the term A.I. back in 1955, technology has been prospering and flourishing in terms of complexity and ability. In recent years, manufacturers have made it possible to access A.I. through sites such as ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Fetch.ai. These sites have made it possible to ask questions such as evidence for assignments, quotes from books, and even gone to the extent where you can ask it to construct not only the base of an essay, but perhaps even write the entirety of the essay for you itself. Whether for pure intentions or ill, A.I. has acquired a reputation to say the least. For example, taken from the Harvard School of Graduate Education Newsletter, around 51% of adolescents between the ages 14 to 22 use A.I. for their assignments, whether solely for information or as a means of cheating the system. Due to other features such as spell checking and grammar correcting, there are thousands of youths growing into adulthood that aren’t aware of how to use proper grammar .A.I. also causes misinformation throughout the whole of social media as there are also features to create pictures and even videos of fake scenarios with generated characters and settings just by inputting a prompt, fooling all who witness.
Is this what our society has come to? Half of the population of young adults resorting to A.I. to perform once simple routine functions, and faux media distributed and disguised as truth. I strongly believe that the longer we rely on A.I. to assist us with our every task, we as a society will be lost in the future when it comes to how to handle our adult lives, and this issue doesn’t only apply to young people.
While A.I. may help us with research, and by far is one of the most influential inventions of our time, it also may result in the decline of generations for years to come, and as much as we’d hope, we unfortunately should not have the comfort of welcoming it with open arms. Our very future may as well be our own demise. Have we learned nothing from Terminator?
