AG on AI
1 August 2026
Why am I too frightened to use AI to write this blog? I suspect the results would be better – more grammatical, more effective use of adjectives, more logical. And it could be….and this is where I really start to worry – more thoughtful, more interesting, more readable.
I first started to worry about the impact of AI when discussing the issue with academic colleagues. How does one judge a student’s work if they’ve used AI to write an essay? How do students learn if AI does the learning for them? Then I had a conversation with a colleague whose partner is a lawyer. He was thinking of retiring early because people were using AI to prepare court cases and so his work was drying up. Suddenly one started to think of all the other careers that were likely to disappear because of AI.
The doom and gloom stories of AI “agents’ going feral fill the media and that’s before the bad guys start to use it to undermine our community and government structures. I used to be an early adopted of technology such as the hardware of portable computers and phones and the software of Twitter and Facebook but I don’t post on Facebook these days, rarely look at Instagram, deleted Twitter as soon as it became X and try to ignore the Google AI when it appears at the top of any web search. As for ChatGPT or Claude, I haven’t used them. Am I just getting old? Have I turned into a Luddite? Or am I just frightened that as Anna Goldsworthy says, we’ve already ceded our superiority to a thing that even its creators no longer understand.
Anna Goldsworthy is a concert pianist, Dean of the Elder Conservatorium of Music and the Performing Arts, novelist and mother of teenagers. This last point is particularly relevant because she uses their insights as useful discussion starters in her Quarterly Essay The God we Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an eminently readable and thoughtful essay of under 100 pages so I’m going to encourage you to read it rather than attempt to summarise it for you. But I will offer one quote to start you thinking – even if that’s exactly what AI might eventually prevent us from doing effectively:
“The potential addictive power of AI is even greater [than social media], as are its neurological and sociological implications. We are susceptible to dopamine. AI is not. Unfair contest. It promised to relieve us of yet more of our mental load, so our brains no longer have to do the heavy lifting of constructing sentences or structuring an argument….Sam Altman cautions against “emotional over-reliance”, pointing to the number of young people already ceding all decision-making to ChatGPT. He speculates about a future in which the president of the United States feels completed to following its recommendations without fully understanding them. Finally, perhaps, there is little point even in attempting a thought, because AI will have got there first.” (26)
There is one moment of optimism in her writing – the belief that humans need to create and it might be the arts, even though the incomes of writers and musicians are under threat, that keep us thinking, keep us connecting and keep us seeing the world through human eyes.
PS An update from 13 August. This week, a number of people that I admire have called for AI development to slow down or even halt. After the Australian story of the AI assistant that hacked a gym website to get it’s “owner” into a class, I’m with them.
For example: Robert Reich on the basis of the impact on employment (he used to be US Labour Secretary
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/stop-ai?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
For example: Bernie Sanders (US Senator) because it’s already evident that we can’t control it.
But will the Tech Bros give up their power and their money?
Unlikely.
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