Life in the Pedestrian Lane: AI or not?

Published 1:30 am Friday, July 18, 2025

“You are the ray of light that lightens up my world, the one and only thing that brings light to my soul. When the clouds gather and the skies turn dismal gray, your presence is what lifts my spirits and fills my heart with joy. I’ll never be able to put into words just how deeply I feel about you, but know this, dear one — my love for you is boundless and true. The thought of losing you is unbearable and I implore you please don’t take your radiance away from me.”

Sound familiar? It should. The first time you heard it it looked like this:

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

You make me happy when skies are gray,

You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

Or maybe you heard Ernest Tubb or Sons of the Pioneers (ask your grandma) singing it. That first paragraph is the AI rendering of that ear-worm. I typed the words into META which appeared on my tablet one day, (in itself rather scary) and typed the request “write a narrative of this verse.”

AI has been in the news a lot lately, but I was most interested when I heard a report in late April that teachers and professors were having to monitor student writing for final papers written by ChatGPT, an AI program available to students of all ages just for the asking. Apparently, they can ask for a 500-word essay on dinosaurs (or any topic) and ChatGPT will produce it. OR they can give it their own writing and ask for a rewrite and It will produce an A+ rewrite of that essay.

I have since heard that it is necessary to check AI’s sources if it presents a research paper and often the vocabulary is beyond what a high school student would use, even to impress a teacher. However, with practice those pitfalls can be corrected. Not sure if it’s easier than asking your best friend to write your science paper in exchange for you writing hers for English Literature.

For some of us, Issac Asimov’s “I, Robot” was our first introduction to AI in the form of robots. In his collection of short stories he presented the three rules of robotics (harm no human, always do what the human tells you, protect yourself) which authors since have adhered to and even those working on AI today refer to the “rules” when programming. “2001, A Space Odyssey” introduced us to HAL, a more sophisticated intelligence, which had a nervous breakdown because he was told to do conflicting tasks by two different people. And of course there is DATA in “Star Trek,” perhaps the ultimate AI personality.

Since then we have Alexa and Siri in our lives, completing various tasks, from directing our driving route to dialing the phone. Also, electronic vacuum cleaners, and some appliances connected wirelessly to the internet to be controlled by phone from afar to turn on the oven, or start the sprinklers or whatever it’s programmed to do. Driverless cars are being developed and even used experimentally in some places.

But AI is not all good. As I was writing this, news came that an aspiring “terrorist” cloned the voices of some administration bigwigs, then contacted other leaders by phone, including some foreign heads of state, setting up meetings and other business. And it has been suggested that some “false news” stories have been generated by AI. And today, I heard that even Elmo had been hacked and posted some derogatory things on social media.

Several celebrities, especially singers, have copyrighted their acts and personas so they can’t be stolen by unscrupulous agents using AI generated pictures and sound tracks. Authors have done the same for their name and “style” to prevent publishers from issuing works in their name with no compensation or recognition.

AI is here to stay, for better or worse, and we have to recognize that there are limitations to its usefulness. “It can only be attributable to human error,” was HAL’s excuse for his own mistake. We maybe need to agree with Asimov that AI needs to be controlled before it controls us. There is a definite difference in “Siri, call mom” and “ This is Siri, I am calling your mom.”