A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A personal friend who happens to be a retired lawyer posted me a text message to say that his daughter who happened to be visiting him produced an Artificial intelligence program. In a few minutes it produced a perfectly requested article on a particular topic. It amazed him and left him asking what this means for professions like law or philosophy or the like and if this can be generated so quickly. He then went on to test another topic. He asked a question about Raimon Panikkar knowing it was the topic of my PhD thesis. He then forwarded the outcome to me, with the question ‘How does this sound?’ To my amazement, it seemed to summarise a good deal of my thesis.

The theme of my thesis was to related the concept of Relational Spirituality and the law of love, ‘to love God and neighbour as oneself’ with Panikkar’s teaching. This was the unique idea of my thesis required of all PhD work. As I read the article most of the concepts were related to these ideas. Many of my expressions were reproduced in the article. Where they weren’t they were close summaries.

What concerned me was that Artificial intelligence was cobbling together what it could trace online and then reproduce it. It‘s unique quality was the speed at which it could be produced. The problem was that it was produced without references or even authorship. It sounds like plagiarism to me.

We fear Artificial Intelligence and wonder how it will change the world of writing. But as long as references and authorship is not identified we will not be able to trust anything that we read.