Fool Me Once . . .

By Janice Lane Palko

You’d have to be living totally off the grid to not know about AI—artificial intelligence for those Luddites among us. 

Every day we see reports of how AI is going to revolutionize our world and lives. From our jobs to health care, it is projected that AI will change our world like never before. 

According to ibm.com, artificial intelligence is: “technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity, and autonomy.” 

Tech experts predict that it will enhance health care as it can more accurately analyze medical tests and scans than humans. It is projected to streamline processes and enhance data collection and analysis in business settings.

That may all be true, and I hope that AI does benefit humanity. However, like most things in this life, I’m sure AI will have the capacity to be used for either good or evil. There have already been news reports of medical students using ChatGPT to cheat on exams. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to be treated by a doctor who cheated to get through med school. 

As a writer, I’m constantly being prodded by my Word program to use Copilot, its AI-powered tool which Word says, “assists with drafting content, summarizing documents, answering questions about your content, rewriting text, and generating ideas or tables.”

In the brief experience I’ve had with using Copilot or other AI tools to compose social media posts, I find the results to be sufficient—coherent and grammatically correct—but it lacks the personality of something written by a human. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to replace the uniqueness that everyone brings to work, creativity, and the world.

I’m skeptical that AI will be the boon that it’s purported to be after spending countless minutes online with a chatbot trying to get a replacement battery for my rechargeable toothbrush. I’m pro-people when it comes to interaction. We still can’t get automated customer service correct.

Also, I see another more mundane problem with AI. Presently, from Facebook to Instagram to X, so much social media is cluttered with AI-generated images—some that are so real that it’s difficult to discern what is fake or what is authentic.

I previously wrote about the death of Ozzy Osbourne. One of the images that appeared on Facebook during that time was a picture of Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant visiting the dying Ozzy Osborne on his deathbed. When I saw this, I initially thought that it was touching—I didn’t know they were friends. But the more I thought about it the more skeptical I became. And sure enough, scores of people in the comments were calling this out as a fake. However, the improbable picture that also appeared online of Ozzy and Pat Boone together was real. The unlikely pair were actually neighbors and friends. The line between real and fake is often blurred with the presence of AI.

As we were talking about how crazy some of the AI junk cluttering the internet is, my son showed me a video of a man in Africa creating a jumbo jet he crafted from wood. The video was so lifelike; it showed him sawing planks, joining pieces, and sanding the outside. It looked plausible that he’d whittled his own aircraft. But it was not.

There have always been snake oil salesmen, flimflam artists, con men, charlatans, and hucksters, but no one likes to be fooled. The adage goes, fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. 

I predict that if AI, at least on social media, corrupts our feeds, fooling people repeatedly, users will leave the platforms. Who wants to be made a fool of?

There are better ways to spend your time, like trying to decide if there really are aliens visiting us.