I’ve been a guest lecturer for professors in both Ireland (John O’Connor) and Turkey (Murat Gulmez) for several years and just listened to a AI Deep Dive podcast featuring my passion for digital citizenship and my work as an information professional through promoting metaliteracy (a model developed by Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson). Working collaboratively across the globe with these amazing educators has been inspiring, yet- surprisingly, I found this podcast deeply disturbing! Click the picture to listen- if interested, my work is at 8:30-26:00 minutes.
To hear two fake “AI” voices that are not real people discuss many years of my work at a time when I cannot get the concepts of digital citizenship in the hands of human students makes me sad! These nonhuman agents summarized the classes I taught in the metaverse in just minutes, yet physical world teachers I talk to do not have time nor the curriculum to help prepare their students for the future as they must focus on the subject areas they teach.
The male and female sycophantic AI voices sound knowledgeable, convincing, and act as if “in awe” of my so-called universally known work (hardly!) even though they cannot possibly think about it critically. AI agents only simulate thinking and simulate human articulation. It is unsettling to have my own words and passion about digital citizenship mashed-up and regurgitated as “digital content” and ironic for them to discuss the “dark side of digital culture” when the voices are uncannily disguised as human. Those two clever bots exemplify the urgent call for metaliteracy and digital citizenship as they pose as experts on the topics in a loop of artificiality. Even more ironic- to have worked in a simulated metaverse for nearly 20 years and consider it a real place. Yet it is clear to me… reality and memory take place in our minds. Yet, for machines to pose as humans is a totally different matter.
AI quickly allows us to produce content (like podcasts, poems, images and more) without the painful reflective process we humans must go through to create and communicate. AI skips process and takes us straight to the product. Perhaps this AI-generated video is not all too far from where we are or where we are headed: Post-Scarcity Blues… declaring “your passion projects, generated in seconds”.
Val, I agree with your underlying concern about AI but, in the spirit of discourse, I want to address the somewhat pejorative statements you make. Let’s start with the ‘two fake “AI” voices that are not real people discuss many years of my work’ making you sad, intimating that there is something not quite right about the presentation. I can’t help but disagree with your characterisation of AI as fake. AI is indeed artificial, it is synthetic, it is manufactured but, using the term ‘fake’ concerns me because it gives permission to dismiss and ignore AI, which humanity cannot afford to do. AI is quite likely the defining technology of the early 21st century and cannot be dismissed: it must be confronted head on.
You also suggest that the ‘nonhuman agents summarised the classes I taught in the metaverse in just minutes’ saying that ‘AI quickly allows us to produce content … without the painful reflective process we humans must go through to create and communicate.’ I propose you are mistaken in this particular instance: in fact, I prompted Google NotebookLM (the tool used to generate the discussion) by providing 10 posts I wrote on the course blog between 2020 and 2025, describing your classes, along with transcripts of eight classes. Each of my posts was carefully written to summarise your presentation as best I could while attempting to situate it in the context of our course. The exact prompt I gave the AI was: ‘Focus on how the class has developed over the years. Focus also on the contribution from guest speaker Valibrarian Gregg and the two course leaders Acuppa Tae and Magua Theriac.’ Therefore, the AI output is really my considered reflections made over five years and repackaged in a new format. I produced the Google NotebookLM ‘podcast’ to present existing content in a new way, designed to address a different audience. It is unlikely that many new readers will find my original blog posts and read them but, making the content available in the form of an AI generated discussion might aid accessibility for contemporary listeners. As you know, I am experimenting with this new tool to explore its potential.
Nonetheless, I sympathise with your feeling of disturbance, understand your concerns, and agree with your warning not to be deluded by the sycophancy of AI. As the French philosopher-activist Bernard Stiegler warned, technology is a pharmakon – both the cure and the illness. You ask important questions. The relative ease with which AI produced a seemingly human discussion is clearly problematic. How do we distinguish human from artificial should unscrupulous individuals hide the origins of such outputs? How can we trust the bona fides of such discussions without knowing their origins? Will we be able to avoid being manipulated as AI becomes more sophisticated and we are less able to discriminate? And, most importantly, (a concern you continually address) how do we prepare the next generation to think for itself?
What a great argument, John. I agree with the points about carefully asking AI to provide what you want summarized to assure accuracy. It is the human-like voices that I find uncanny because they are rapidly become so life-like. I agree with researcher Sherry Turkle who has been studying AI and robots for many years. She clearly believes we should keep AI as a machine and never embody AI in human form because we are easily persuaded to believe an AI companion is a “real person”. Those two voices are not human and they and the large language models behind them are becoming powerful perhaps before we understand their potential. Your use is certainly academic and essential, so I do not mean to criticize the excellent examples you shared. In fact, I am inspired by that exploration because we both agree AI is not going away and must embrace the positive potential while striving to avoid the negative consequences. I look forward to more conversation on this topic.