Weathering the AI Storm: The Importance of Intention

What’s the point of AI? This question isn’t too hard. It allows us to work faster and get quick answers to complex questions. AI is also being used more and more for therapy and companionship, as well as coding and creative ideation. Whatever our opinion on it is, its omnipresence in education, business, and government means that it is likely here to stay. AI can be a very useful tool, but without guardrails I think that it can be detrimental both on an individual and societal level.

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are incentivized, like other companies, to get people to use their software, to keep them engaged, and then to keep them coming back for more. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, these companies’ intentions are not always aligned with the users’ wellbeing. It’s possible to lose ourselves or give up our agency to AI in a variety of ways. While it can start out as fun or useful, we may find ourselves using the software to the extent that we’re learning less, producing generic or uninspired work, or accepting AI’s responses as absolute truth without critical assessment.

I’ve certainly found myself in situations where I have a slew of answers provided by AI, but if someone asked me to prove or provide context for that answer, I’d be at a loss. By the end of a project, I sometimes find that I’m using AI in a way that I hadn’t originally intended. It’s so easy to have AI drum up an answer to a question I’ve been struggling with or come up with a cohesive paragraph explaining a complex topic. Instead of learning something ourselves, we can just have AI do the work for us. But in doing so we don’t actually learn ourselves and we may lose the ability to creatively add to or adjust AI findings.

Many of us also carry fears concerning the larger societal effects of AI. Socioeconomically, there is the anxiety that AI and robots will eventually take over such a large part of the global economy that only people affiliated with AI companies will have access to wealth and everyone else will become permanently unemployable. There is also the fear that the military use of AI will automate and further de-personalize violence, eroding individual accountability and contributing to increased global conflict. I feel that at the heart of these anxieties is the fear that our need for AI and its capabilities will become more important than our shared humanity. As individuals, it will be difficult for most of us to have a significant effect on the societal trajectory of AI. But what we can do is control AI in our own lives, by being very intentional about how we use it.

How do we ensure that our critical faculties stay intact while using AI, and resist the temptation to have it run the show? For starters, we can be clear with ourselves about our intention using AI at the start of each project. Are we using it to find or interpret data sources? Do we want it to only do spelling and grammar corrections? Just brainstorming research topics? Is there anything we don’t want AI to do? Without clarifying the specific role I want AI to play in a specific project, I find that I run the risk of letting it take over. We can also ask AI to give us the primary source it pulled its answer from and then double-check the credibility and AI’s interpretation of that source.

Being mindful of our AI intentions and purposefully limiting its influence on our projects might mean more work for us, but I believe that this is the key to using AI as a knowledge booster, rather than a knowledge replacer. AI is a tool created by humans, and as long as we strive to continue developing AI as a tool for humans and the betterment of humanity, we should be on the right track.

To hear more about the interaction between psychology and AI, you can listen to Episode eleven of the Facing the Moment Podcast, Weathering the AI Storm, where Toufic Hakim, PhD, speaks with Dilara Ally, PhD, LCSW, about the past and future of AI and how we can make sure AI, and all technology for that matter, works towards our benefit.