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NOVELISTS, IT EXPERTS AND TOP BOFFINS ARE REFUSING TO USE THE MACHINES AND THEY BELIEVE IT'S ONE IT WILL MAKE US STUPID AND LEAVE HOLLOW SHELLS 15:36, 04 Jun 2025Updated 15:53, 04 Jun
2025 A backlash is growing against the rise of AI bots in our everyday lives over fears they’ll make us stupid and leave us “hollowed-out”. Boffins, novelists and IT experts are leading the
charge by refusing to use the machines as they reckon people are “better off if they don’t use them”. The boffins say generative AI is “one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with”
as it incapacitates us by stopping you from doing the “things they’ve been doing easily for years”, like writing emails and making up stories for your kids. They fear we’ll get to the point
that “you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else”. We “won’t know anything” as all our decisions will be made for us by the robots. Article continues below
Filmmaker and writer Justine Bateman said artificial intelligence is “one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with”. She fumed: “They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the
things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. “You will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. “You won’t know
anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. “One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear
disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.” Multi-award winning Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison said the relentless rise of artificial intelligence will spark “tech
addiction”, have a disastrous ecological impact and inflict untold “damage” on the education system. He warned: “Ninety-two per cent of students are now using AI.” The writer is also
fretting about the spying and weapons capabilities of AI – which are becoming eerily like those used by the Terminator in James Cameron’s sci-fi flick about robots launching a nuclear
assault on humanity. He added about AI-enabled weapons being used to bomb Ukraine: “I find that ethically revolting.” April Doty, an audiobook narrator, is also appalled at the environmental
cost of the technology, which is sucking up huge amounts of electricity and water to cool its servers, and wants to switch it off. She said: “I’m infuriated that you can’t turn off the AI
overviews in Google search. “Whenever you look anything up now you’re basically torching the planet. “More and more we’re surrounded by it, and there’s no off switch. That makes me angry.”
She also raged AI was nicking her job, with an increasing number of audiobooks being read by machines. “I don’t know anybody who wants a robot to read them a story, but I am concerned that
it is going to ruin the experience to the point where people don’t want to subscribe to audiobook platforms any more,” she said. “Narrators don’t just read words; they sense and express the
feelings beneath the words. AI can never do this job because it requires decades of experience in being a human being.” Article continues below Emily M Bender, a linguistics professor at the
University of Washington and co-author of a new book, The AI Con, said she despises ChatGPT and the content it churns out by mining humanity’s works online. She vented: “I’m not interested
in reading something that nobody wrote. “I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.”