2 hours ago
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Nesrine Malik is right to worry about the effect that AI may have on writing (AI is devoid of meaning and humanity. That’s why its vapid voice suits this political moment, 1 June). The examples she cites of fabricated quotations and unreliable research should concern anyone who values truth and public trust.
However, I suspect the deeper problem is not AI’s bland prose but its relationship to evidence. The writers caught out by false quotations were often not trying to deceive. They believed that they were using AI as a research aid while retaining editorial control. Yet somehow, fiction entered the factual record. The issue was not laziness but misplaced confidence in a system that can produce plausible reconstructions without distinguishing between what was observed, inferred or simply generated.
Malik is surely right that overreliance on AI may weaken habits of thought and expression. But the greater danger is that it weakens our habit of checking where ideas came from in the first place. A fluent sentence is not the same as a trustworthy one. The challenge posed by AI is not merely preserving individual voice, important though that is. It is preserving provenance – our ability to trace claims back to evidence and observation. A fabricated quote and a genuine one can now arrive wearing the same suit.
Dr Simon Nieder
Chesterfield, Derbyshire
An excellent column by Nesrine Malik. I first came across AI in 1989 while doing a feasibility study for a science park linked to Edinburgh University, which had a research institute devoted to AI. Although interested, I was sceptical of its utility. Developments since have increased my scepticism and converted it to deep concern.
As Malik observes, AI’s dependence on large language models makes the language it uses glib and persuasive, but the ideas it clothes (even when free of gross errors) are necessarily derivative and unoriginal. And as more of what it is trained on itself becomes AI-generated, this backward-looking character can only get worse in a vicious circle.
The gung-ho spirit in which developers, users and the UK government are approaching the rollout of AI is frankly terrifying. Can we really risk inviting this persuasive and all-enveloping but dodgy technology into the heart of our economy, society and governance?
Alan Wenban-Smith
Birmingham
The problem with AI is that it has no empathy. It has no emotions and cannot sense them in others. Creative and artistic outputs therefore have no feeling to them, and it requires a human to differentiate between the occasional meaningful item in the output from the dross.
The tech bros making trillions out of it, of course, have no empathy either, which is how they can make money by exploiting others’ ideas. Empathy, as they say, is interfering with their egotistical ideas of progress.
Michael Peel
London
“Forgive me for sounding like a luddite,” writes Nesrine Malik. The original luddites were prescient artisans protecting their livelihoods against repressive and exploitative employers who were destroyed by wholly disproportionate, panic-induced government legislation. Surely an epithet to be proudly worn by Ms Malik rather than misguidedly disparaged in her attempt to stimulate recognition of our own 21st-century ‘‘industrial revolution’’.
Dianne Lewis
Norland, West Yorkshire
Thanks, Nesrine Malik, for your interesting article on AI, though I really don’t believe that AI could produce a Dickens or a Rumi. Whenever I read something produced by AI, l feel the lack of a real soul speaking. There is no voice that is human, unique and irreplaceable.
Elizabeth Cope
Dorking, Surrey
