Commentary

‘Just pencil it in…’

November 3, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

A person used to say, “We’ll just pencil that in …” and it meant that a meeting or occasion was proposed but not necessarily set. I remembered it for no particular reason the other day and soon learned that it is, as I suspected, no longer in common use because digital has replaced the tentative with surety.

What seems like only recently, AI is now the first line of information for anything and everything one ever looks up: the AI Overview, talking to us like an old pal, condescending to us, treating us like children, permeating our lives.

We used to think that if it was in the paper, something published, it must be true, but there was far less published only a few years ago than there is now, and we know for sure that not everything that was and is published in the papers or shown to us on TV is true, correct, or trustworthy.

So much more now, we are awash with definitions and information with our mentor, AI dishing it out; with everyone in the universe, a device at their fingertips to “publish” information that is questionable, true, or an outright lie. Yet, our technology is deeply flawed because we are deeply flawed, and we continue to accept what we are with complacency.

Over the last, say, decade, the grandfathers of AI had started to warn us against developing AI too far, but the developers, the machine learning techies, are too much in the grip of how clever they are and how amazingly clever they can make their machines, with strange voices that are worryingly more and more in charge while being absolutely soulless.

So, their warnings have been ignored, and maybe the grandfathers were paid to change their stance because, at some point, some of them were telling us not to worry about the artificially intelligent creatures we were building, that all would be well; they are useful tools. They will aid health workers with diagnoses and run our factories without the need for humans on the lines.

In a recent interview on the BBC program Newsnight, with Geoffrey Hinton, formerly vice-president of Google and acknowledged as one of the “Godfather of AI,” he was clear about not just the risks of AI “taking over” but the inevitability of it. The major reason for the cautious note from this formidable expert is that he blames the competitiveness of AI development worldwide.

“The competition increases the risks of not taking caution to control the development of AI,” Hinton told the interviewer, and stated categorically that there is an existential risk.

AI could decide to “take over.” That existential risk is true.

There are many fallacies about what AI understands. Chatbots, originally developed by Microsoft, are software programs that simulate human conversation to understand and respond in a conversational way, learning to sound more human over time.

Perforce, Google “had no choice” but to similarly develop its own Chatbot, Hinton said.

Hinton warns that AI is developing an understanding of how the brain works, which may exceed our own. It is the speed at which AI is learning on its own that worries him.

Governments are passing laws to restrain AI development, especially in the matter of the military, but there is no slowing the global competition for control through AI and what could become an arms race on a whole different level. So, as he says, “those laws have no teeth.”

Here, I am not qualified, nor do I know the language really to talk about AI. You can listen to Hinton’s fascinating interview with the link below, but be warned: what he has to say is difficult.

Probably, there is nothing we can do to stop the flood, but we can care about how humanity will benefit from and suffer because of the growing involvement and interference of AI in our lives.

Geoffrey Hinton is clear about the increasing need for Basic Income in the inevitable face of job loss to AI. As he put it, the use of AI in workplaces will lead to greater profits, which will certainly not be shared by the very people who have been replaced but will go into the pockets of those reaping them.

Yet, not only is Basic Income more and more essential to lessening the level of poverty, but there is also the factor of self-respect in doing a job that is meaningful and earns a living, and that too will have to be addressed within society.

While AI is running the mechanical world before it takes over the artistic world, we can and should push back against that; I was recently invited to join a webinar on how to use AI to enhance fictional, etc. writing! Every publication warns against submitting AI tampered work – so the invitation was an insult and a mystery. I did not attend.

We can work as artists and patrons to remember that art is where we are at our best as humans. It is what defines us.

Remember: AI has no “soul” that spark in us that is in addition to our flesh and blood and brain.

AI can imitate but never aspire.

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