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I Wonder About AI

  • Writer: Susan Edsall
    Susan Edsall
  • Jun 17
  • 5 min read

Updated: Jun 24

The thrill and possibility of Artificial Intelligence is so immense that we imagine we can handle it—the downsides I mean. Or we discount the downsides entirely because, like Faust, we can’t resist its power or its promises.


The downside I fear the most is one I don’t hear talked about much, perhaps because it’s small and personal and can’t be easily monetized: the value of wondering.


As our lives speed up, as we click and emoji and swipe one direction or the other, we are in danger of losing our ability and desire to noodle through a question, to take an uncountable number of side roads and in consequence to discover something new about ourselves or about the situation. We are in danger of losing the thrill of scrabbling through the underbrush of a hunch and suddenly discovering we were asking the wrong question from the get go. We risk trading the struggle of wrestling with our thinking for the speed of an already formed thought. The relief of getting something done and moving on sacrifices the enlightenment that comes from the effort of the pursuit.


This past April, Mark Simon, a reporter for The Daily Journal in the San Francisco Peninsula, wrote an opinion column about traffic in San Francisco. A friend of mine suggested he use ChatGPT to write the piece. It took three seconds for ChatGPT to spit out this reporter’s opinion. He admitted that he got more than the usual compliments.


Where do I begin to name what is troubling about that? First of all, was it his opinion? Or did it become his opinion? He said he made only a few edits. There’s a big incentive to adopt an opinion that took three seconds to produce rather than spend the afternoon wondering what you really think about San Francisco traffic—or, better yet, whether there is something more interesting to wonder about. To be clear, ChatGPT does not think. It gathers what other people have previously thought. Nothing new is going on here—ChatGPT isn’t having any aha moments. More importantly, nothing new is going on in that reporter’s head and, in consequence, probably nothing new is going on in the reader’s head either. More likely it’s something people can simply agree with or disagree with because it has all been thought and said before and nobody needs to change their mind.


Offhand I can imagine writing an article that got inside the head of the person running the stop sign on a side street in San Francisco and wondering why they might do that. What could be going on for that person that might be more interesting than the driver being a lawbreaking lout?


Maybe what’s going on for that person is also going on for others. Maybe we’re all running red lights and plowing through stop signs not because we’re jerks, but because we’re working three jobs, scared we’re going to be late for the third, but need to pick up the two-year-old before daycare closes and they start leveling fines. Maybe all the technology in our lives has isolated us to the point where we’ve lost our ability to empathize, to imagine that someone is doing the best they can even when what they’re doing is dangerous and dumb. Maybe. Maybe not. But I guarantee you there is a much more interesting article to be written than bellyaching about people in traffic. And AI is not going to come up with it. A person wondering is going to come up with it. I will cede that if you ask AI a more interesting question, it might spit out a more interesting answer. But what I won’t cede is this: By not traveling those side roads yourself you lose something important. You lose the chance to discover a new question, or gain an awareness of something larger or smaller going on here, or of discovering an assumption you made that, unearthed, you find appalling. You lose the chance to become more self-aware. The cumulative cost to you personally and to our larger society of bypassing a practice of wondering is unknown and unknowable. I have no doubt that someone could ask AI what the cost of that is and that AI would spit something out. And it would seem true. And the speed and proper grammar and sans serif font would lure you into the elegance and rightness of whatever certainty populates your screen in three seconds.


But there is a cost that even AI can’t calculate—both for the individual and for our collective community: the loss that occurs when we bypass wonder. And the ability and the desire to wonder matters. It keeps us flexible in our minds, helps us make connections we might not otherwise make, generates both empathy and new ideas.


Another friend recently told me that someday soon AI will be writing novels better than anything on the shelves.


Maybe so. I have no need to argue the point. Because it’s not the point. The point is: What is lost? For you as the author, what is lost is the joy of the struggle, the discovery that the newspaper boy wears the same shirt everyday for a reason you hadn’t known about until he has an experience that makes the reason both clear and moving. What is lost is the memory that emerges from deep storage as your main character finds she is wearing exactly the wrong thing as she sits down for her interview, a memory that has new meaning for you with the distance of fifty years and causes you to alter the scene you’re writing. What is lost is realizing the story isn’t about the boy, but about the girl. What is lost is that writing the novel or the essay or the letter to an estranged friend forces you to make sense of what you think and therefore what you have to say. To bypass this struggle is to lose the chance—even the ability—to find the clarity of thought that comes from trying to make sense of things and make those same things make sense to someone else. What is lost is the thrill of your own tiny enlightenment, as well as the enlightenment itself.


The labor of writing is generally not about getting something down. It’s about getting to the heart of the matter. When you write—or draw or compose or paint or look at cells through a microscope—it reminds you of other things that seem initially unrelated. There’s something gloriously human about finding a gem at the periphery of your vision. Or discovering a feeling you were unaware you had—or wanted.


So what is lost to the efficiency of AI is finding a new thread, one that might be more disturbing, iIlluminating your own confusion. What is lost is discovering your own incoherence. What is lost is the new and the surprising that the process of wondering delivers. What is lost is the change that occurs inside you, the change that comes from looking for the answer, much more than from finding it, the change that comes from burning the whole afternoon wondering.

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“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.”

E.M. Forster

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