Manning: My real concerns with artificial intelligence

By Terry Manning

First, I don’t hate artificial intelligence.

I have to remind myself and others of that from time to time. A look at my social media posts would imply otherwise.

Across platforms, I share articles and short videos of people describing how A.I. is ruining our ability to think and evaluate, cheating us of the discoveries we can make while trying to create things, and generally making our brains as flabby as the rest of too many of our bodies.

But no, I don’t hate artificial intelligence. I use it too often to reject it entirely.

Everything I write is the product of a drawn-out process, the speed of which is dictated by my inability to type worth a darn. Hunt-and-peck is a generous description for the labored way I type, type, type, pause, review, delete, re-type and repeat until I finish or get tired of trying.

In high school, typing class was on a track that conflicted with AP English (ironic, isn’t it?), so I never learned. I was despondent about it until I found out a former boss of mine, Corinne Holt Sawyer, was able to earn her Ph.D. and become a successful crime novelist without ever learning how to type conventionally.

My thoughts, words, and the ways I construct them to share with others are all mine, though I use A.I. to catch and correct errors. I like Grammarly because, unlike some other software, it points out my mistakes without suggesting wholesale rewrites of what I am trying to communicate.

I use artificial intelligence when editing photos I take on my digital cameras. I generally adhere to the stance of not doing anything in Adobe Photoshop that I couldn’t have done in the darkroom days (crop, exposure adjustments, dodge-and-burn). I can still manually select a texture from one part of a photo to cover up an unwanted intrusion in another, but it is a lot quicker to let A.I. tools do some of that for me.

I warn subjects I am not in the business of making everyone who…

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