Generative AI Might Make Us More Fundamentalist

The humanities are lost in a rigid binary of information exchange

Symbiosis is two organisms interacting with one another in a mutually beneficial way. More poetically, symbiosis is the biological art of living together, of shared, interactive resources, of collaboration.

Amensalism is the opposite; an asymmetrical interaction where one organism is fatal to the other, but the killer is unaffected, unbothered, and sociopathic in the quest to consume mutual resources.

That I kept feeling the word symbiosis rise while researching for my second book grated (the title was announced this week in Publisher’s Marketplace.) Search engines are not biological. We don’t collaborate or live in harmony together as beings.

Until recently, search engines relied on keywords to match inquiries with results. A user would input the term; the engine would reward with results including that term.

The search engine did not have an opinion on the terms used; keyword-to-inquiry is a matchmaking process. “It doesn’t assert a perspective one way or another. It just gives you places to go visit to do your own research,” said Jim Yu, founder of BrightEdge, an SEO marketing and software company.

Algorithms used autocomplete, natural language processing, personal history patterns, and data and behavioral analysis to offer additional content. It was mathematical. Creativity remained in the human mind; the search engine was a tool.

AI changes this. Artificial Intelligence thinks about your research. It develops a formed opinion.

The search engine now will use the AI to take a single search query, assemble the entire related areas of conversation, run those searches, summarize that with the AI, and give you a very well-researched and well-thought-out and summarized point of view. — Jim Yu, interviewed by Forbes.com

As I work, I can feel AI search forming its opinion, competing with me in the direction we’re going, steering and leading my attention. At first, I thought I was imagining the tug. I’m accustomed to computers behaving like machines, not intelligent forces with an opinion on where I should go.

An opinion is a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.

Generative AI is intended to make research more efficient. The reward of my search is supposed to result in more context and more relevant facts. Webpages packed with keywords but ultimately not offering helpful information will be eliminated for me. AI’s opinion is intended to be formed on more accurate facts, on the aggregated information I couldn’t possibly have time to sift through and understand.

I have heard this before. I’m from the Christian Patriarchy, where everything from my clothing to education to entertainment was determined for me. My bias when choices are made for me, especially when it’s sold as a benefit I didn’t ask for, is to wonder who’s left out of the curation, and why.

If you read my work, you’ve probably observed I use definitions, vocabulary, and grammar to deconstruct, clarify, illuminate, and reframe ideologies often. I write with a dictionary and thesaurus tabs open. I love research.

“Way leads on to way,” wrote the poet Robert Frost. It was a line that leaped out at me this week when I’d searched “the road less traveled.”

My irritation flared when the results came up. I’m used to a specific inquiry resulting in keyword-rich results. I expected the poem to come up first, followed by related phrases and combinations known as search engine optimization (SEO.)

Instead, I got an Amazon result for a book called The Road Less Traveled. A travel program called The Road Less Traveled, a few more book sites, and a series of questions:

• What is the main idea of The Road Less Traveled? (I hadn’t asked for book analysis)

• What is the saying of The Road Less Traveled? (why is this in caps like the book, as if that’s the decided-upon result?)

• What does the road less Travelled mean? (why did it change the spelling?)

• Is the Road Less Traveled worth reading? (OMG that’s subjective!)

I’m a human who reads poetry so thankfully, I knew to add “poem” to my inquiry. Thankfully, the Poetry Foundation’s website was optimized for search, with keywords in the URL and titles, with confirming text on the page. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken was eventually confirmed.

I wonder if future generations, who haven't been raised to value curiosity and the humanities, will input the fragment of a poem and come away with a self-help book.

Predictive questions steer direction. While on the surface, this can seem helpful, it also bothers me how easily the navigational power can shift, from tool in the hand of creator, to symbiotic beings in harmony, to a descent into amensalism. From the beginning, I decided not to fear AI. What’s giving me pause is not fear of the unknown or advanced technology, but experiencing how subtly it takes control.

As a thoughtful human being, I know what I want and what to discard. In this case, I knew I was looking for a poem. The quality of my search depended on the depth of my education, awareness, and goal. I’m capable of wonder, imagination, and exploration and I bring that capability to my research process. I want to know “what else is there” when I’m researching. Curiosity is essential to the quality of research. Otherwise, I’m at the mercy of another’s intelligence, accepting whatever information they offer. Spoon-fed. Controlled.

I don’t want a machine to decide for me, that in their opinion, the information I most need to receive is what they’ve determined for me is most helpful.

I would have loved my search inquiry to result in a poem with that line, a painting titled the same, a traffic analysis on which roads are less traveled, and a quirky coffee shop making a literary reference with their store name. Each of those results would’ve resulted in a journey.

Way leads on to way.

What I’m finding lost in the efficiency of generative search is more than just right-side creativity, but also humanity. Art, interpretation, relation, and poems…these are processes that use the left side of the brain. We need a whole brain to live. The humanities are the powerful passion play that proves we’re alive. They require imagination and deviation and without them, we’re linear, logical, formulaic, uninspired. We’re fundamentalists, valuing ideas over what makes us human.

Generative search offers results without a journey. To me, that’s like travel without the in-between. There is no road less traveled because there’s no more road. There’s here, and there, with very little in-between, alongside, or off the beaten path. While that sounds very sci-fi beam-me-up-scotty cool, when it comes to knowledge and research, I’m not sure we should skip the exploration step. I have a hunch our own aggregation matters in the choices we make with what to do with the information we gather.

The Road Less Traveled by Red, Linda Harrison

Of course, roads do exist; just because we’re not taking the journey doesn’t mean it’s not there waiting. There’s also content, context, and experience in between, alongside, and off the beaten path. The efficient will fly over; the inefficient will be left out. Traditionally, that’s the poor, marginalized, differently-abled, women and children.

I wonder if generative search is creating a new privilege, and those outside of its reward will suffer.

The loss of our libraries is often justified by the power of the internet. Why would need to browse for books when everything we could ever care to know is at our fingertips, in our phones? Why would we browse at all when generative AI can offer us specific answers to our specific questions? What happens when our libraries are gone and we’re reliant on AI’s opinion of what we should know?

Involuntarily a Bible verse comes to mind. I resent this reflex sometimes, because of the amount of trauma I deal with from religion. But the nudge toward the narrow fits.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” — Matthew 7:13-14

In fundamentalism, browsing (in libraries or in general) was discouraged. So were the humanities, for that matter. The liberal arts were seen as dangerous. Books were banned long before Moms of Liberty hit the PTA.

Narrow, binary thinking, fed to us by powers we understood to be wiser than us, was what was safe.

I’m self-educated now because, in fundamentalism, formal education was discouraged. I’m curious-natured despite knowing how shamed curiosity is as distrust, rebellion, lust, and love of the (sinful) world. I love to learn. I crave the rabbit trail. I like it when browsey searches turn up weird shit full of wonder that broadens my worldview.

One of my favorite habits has been to read a poem of the day. Alexa has “Routines” that can be set up to offer key information each day—the date, time, weather. I want a poem. When I ask Alexa for one, she reads a riddle. When I say, “no, a poem,” she says, “hmmm. I don’t know that one.”

Lately, I’ve been offering Alexa feedback every day.

“Alexa, I want to offer feedback.”

“Okay, what’s the feedback?”

“I want a poem of the day as part of a routine.”

“Okay. Thanks for telling me.”

If Generative AI is going to feed us information according to its formed opinion, then I think it’s on us to make sure the humanities are included in our society lest they be lost. Narrow binaries aren’t going to offer color, passion, and wonder on their efficient road to super-knowledge. They’ll decide for us what’s worth it to know.

As the poet said:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Birth in a New Nation: a speculative fiction short story in four segments that envisions maternity care in a Christian Patriarchy where embryos have full personhood rights, and women do not; a world where monitoring pregnancies and criminalizing pregnancy loss the way the GOP is trying to do now, has become a widespread reality. A partial version of this story placed third in the 2019 Short Story Project competition and was a 2020 Screencraft finalist.

Preorder A WELL-TRAINED WIFE; read the starred Kirkus review.