Recently, a new service for creating images with artificial intelligence released by Google has become the new toy of social media personalities, with everyone creating images with this new expression of generative artificial intelligence with the cute name Nano Banana. However, many in fact, many have not realised that, driven by curiosity and the urge to test the system and publish their artwork on LinkedIn or Instagram, they have ended up on a website, appropriately designed from the domain name to the interface, by an Asian company that has nothing to do with Google and that probably needed to build a nice database of images.
This is a typical case of AI being used as a cognitive crutch: the task is delegated to artificial intelligence and the brain is switched off, allowing oneself to be guided without judgement or discernment. There are countless examples of this. Recently, for example, there have been countless cases of tourists (travellers are made of different stuff) who have found themselves stranded at borders because they did not have the necessary documents, claiming that ‘ChatGPT provided incorrect information’. This happened to a Spanish tourist, a content creator and influencer, who wanted to go on a romantic trip with her boyfriend to Puerto Rico but was stranded and let the world know with the inevitable video of her crying, which was shared on social media. It happened to an Australian professional who was unable to leave for Chile because the change in regulations had not been recorded by ChatGPT, which may be good at putting information together but is unaware of everything that has happened in recent times, and you, the user, should know this.
Without going into more dramatic cases that have even led to fatal consequences, which are also in the news these days, it is now clear that so-called generative artificial intelligence is no longer considered by many to be a simple auxiliary tool but rather a sort of oracle, People turn to it to do the intellectual work they no longer want to do, because it is less tiring to make AI ‘think’ than their own neurons. Fortunately, most people use AI constructively, aware that it is a sophisticated tool, but still just that, like search engines and automatic translators, all tools that can be helpful but not a substitute. If I am looking for a I verify information from multiple sources before accepting it.I check the dates of the references I find, I do some cross-checking, if I have to. When writing a text, I can also get help from AI, but in the end, I at least reread it before publishing it.I verify that the sources cited are correct (there are now numerous cases of legal documents written with AI, or rather by AI, that cite references, precedents, and non-existent cases, another fine example of cognitive crutches), if When translating a text from one language to another, I am not satisfied with the AI’s response; I look for confirmation.If I know both languages, I check directly to see if everything is OK, otherwise I try to use multiple tools. If I come across an image that I find unusual or peculiar, I try to understand its source, to verify that it is a real photo and not the result of some nanobananistic exercise.
If I want to know how to best use AI tools, I try to understand how they work, to know that theirs is not intelligence in the full sense of the term, but rather the ability to perform statistical calculations that allow probabilistic results to be obtained. I try to understand the reasons behind the so-called phenomenon of hallucinations, discovering that the training models of the most widely used generalist AIs are artificially limited to a precision that is less than 100% and therefore inherently prone to error. I try to understand that there is a whole world of AI algorithm applications that is very specific, often invisible, but very useful. If I want to To use AI correctly and consciously, I must not only avoid using it as a substitute for thinking, i.e. as a cognitive crutch., but I must also be aware of how it works by learning, for example, that behind the systems of Generative AI involves not only powerful microprocessors, sophisticated algorithms and advanced training models, but also human beings whose task is to assist with automatic responses. (a sort of artificial-artificial intelligence) as highlighted in an article written by Rest Of World, a publication that writes about the global tech world and often about what comes out of the normal mainstream channels, which was published in April this year and which you can read here (it is in English, but AI can help you, to be used wisely), a theme that emerged dramatically with the case of the scale-up Builder.ai which sold AI systems that were actually powered by human operators based in India. (photo by notorious v1ruS on Unsplash)
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