Artificial Intelligence, a blessing or a scourge?
Artificial Intelligence, a blessing or a scourge?
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 05:59:00
Source Domain: www.theportugalnews.com
Artificial Intelligence (AI) worries me. Not because I am afraid to lose my job. Already lost it to AI! No, it worries me because of all the implications. Because of what it is becoming, of what it will soon evolve into. And what it does to humankind, or rather what humankind lets it do to them. It is making humans passive. They let technology do for them, decide for them, asking AI what to do, instead of thinking it through themselves. Thinking, using those grey cells of ours, is somehow becoming outmoded. I remember the time when we used to say, we don’t have to know everything, as long as we know where to look for the answers. That was us doing the looking. Now many people just let AI do the looking, and, worse, believing all AI tells them.
What we have now is open AI, such as chatGPT. You ask it a question and it gives you an answer. It can be a useful tool if, for instance, you are writing an article and you want to check it and maybe ask for some textual improvements. I know people that use it to write their thank you or birthday cards. Students use it to finalise their school projects, or even their doctorate thesis. But there’s another side to it. How can we know what is real and what is fake, if we just let a chatbot tell us their truth.
There was a newly appointed rector of a university in Belgium. She had AI write her whole inauguration speech. It had an Einstein quote in it, of which she said, you will all know this quote… AI had made up the quote, and it truly sounded like something Einstein could have said, but didn’t.
“Dogma is the enemy of progress, as you may know,” said Albert Einstein, supposedly, as quoted by Petra De Sutter in her inaugural speech as rector of the University of Ghent last September. The problem is, Einstein never uttered those words. The quote was fabricated by AI. She never checked! She got caught and publicly shamed. Would you want a person like that as your rector?
Or what about Deloitte in Australia. This…
