Back to human - resisting the devil's tool

 

 

In the Biblical story of Job, the devil challenged God that the righteous man Job was only a faithful believer due to God blessing him with wealth, family and good health, and if he were to be stripped of all this, he'd curse God. The devil challeneged God to take all wealth away and reduce Job to a wretched human being to prove his point. God then gave permision to the devil to tempt Job whilst taking away all he had. Job did not succumb and endured the test. This shows that God is almighty and it is only through His permission and will that the devil tempts us but it is through our free will that we choose how to act.

Is AI God's permission to the devil to test man? Man seems to fail abysmally. Those who are able to see beyond the flashy exterior of technological innovation and progress, might be already retreating to calmer, more human-ridden, spaces. While Internet democratized access to and sharing of ideas and content, AI seems to be pushing people away towards more personal face-to-face spaces to share and create away from AI's greedy eyes.

AI is the devil's way of subverting God's creation - man - through degrading the mind, mocking and disturbing human art and twisting man's reality though illusive visuals and fake content. The latter is directly mocking all God's creation by interfering with the way things are as we know them. This is not a positive disruption in the way revolutions or progress are. This is a deliberately malicious and insidious destruction.

One way to revolt to this, which is also a way of resisting the temptation, is to focus on human creativity and art. Whatever man created is through the hand of God that gifted and blessed man to create. Learn about art, share it, engage in activities that promote art become an artist yourself or a musician. Why not a photographer? That is another way to capture and spread the beauty of God's art - nature.  Become a celebration of God's power invested in you!

 

A collage of my beach art, Rhodes, 2023

 

A very first clumsy attempt at making makrame with stones and shells from my favourite beach

 

Another early attempt at drawing with water colours

 

One of the hundreds of my collages of flowers with my own pictures

These are some of the busrts of creativity I indulged in. I also learned to knit and made two scarves. I am trying my hand at decorative gardening - I cannot say I excel there, but it gives me pleasure and keeps me away from screens.

Gen AI disruption of the logos 

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

John 1:1

The apperance of LLMs and their use for accessing large databases of human-produced textual resources has further disrupted the traditional way of accessing knowledge and producing written words. LLMs are like vultures picking on human flesh and then vomitting whatever they have gathered that was freely available and accessible. Is your brain that hungry and lazy to feed on the vomit? It can't be nourishing or beneficial. Also, we all know that AI hallucinates and brings up false results. It cannot be trusted but humans instinctively do so by analogy and the habit of having used older versions of search funcionalities. 

What can we do about it? Go back to human written paper books where AI does not have access and cannot copy and disrupt. Share books with each other, become a member of a library if you are not one, go to readings and book clubs face-to-face - in other words, stay away from screens, where AI thrives. Starve it of your input and engagement! It is like a leech, a parasite. If you do not give it food, it will perish! By engaging and using it, you feed your knowledge and expertise into it for free. It then becomes the property of everyone who searches on the Iternet. But that is noble, some would say. To share your knowledge and contribute to the well-being and enrichment of others. I'm sure academics contracting with publishers who then sell their work for AI training wouldn't agree on that one.

Penny for your soul

The above creates an interesting conundrum I would say. On the one hand, we have academics who value coyright and human-created high quality content which they sell for profit and/or use for accruing other forms of capital as a result. On the other hand, we have those same academics striving to use AI and teach others how to use it "responsibly" (whatever that might mean and how the heck do you measure responsible use?). The latter phenomenon is only as a result of a changing dynamic HE context, where academics feel the pressure to be up-to-date with latest developments necessitated by the neoliberal competition-driven environement. They are with tied hands - adapt or die. So they adapt, but at the expense of what?

I have been observing and reading on the use of AI in my field - academic writing and research skills/ EAP. I feel many practitioners have adopted a more AI-inclusive stance purely for the above mentioned reasons rather than from an intrinsic curiosity to explore technological fields unploughed before. In any case, if you are an academic, you have to take a stance on the matter and act accordingly. A lukewarm postition is not giving you credit as a repsectable principled individual. All those who are saying they are fully aware of the harms of AI but still want to promote "responsible" use are hypocites at the very least and /or very confused individuals who maybe have to think of their own values as educators and individuals. Oh, there is another option - very pragmatic folk, who think they are too clever by adapting to the new environment. Only they are no different from ostriches, having hidden their heads in the sand and thinking they are safe. In 5 years' time (or even less!) their jobs position or indeed subject specialism will be eaten by AI, which they think they are effectively utilising while it is using them mercilessly. 

The final frontier is "emotional AI". But despite AI being used as a chatbot and companion, it is no living and thinking entity. It is parroting and regurgitating whatever it was fed. Relying on it as a substitute for human thinking, attention and care is an insult to human intelligence and capabilities.

Whenever there is a lack, there is the potential for temptation and addiction. The system has holes, and there are entities who are ready to offer solutions which seem very convenient and useful. Using AI as a companion for lonely people is a case in point. Why not train and employ the myriads jobless or even homeless to be carers? That way they will have a job and a shelter. It's a matter of resource allocation and human resource management. No need of external agents to fill voids which can be more effectively taken up by existing resources. It is clear the aim is not to genuinely help and save but to disrupt and push the human out of the loop. The latter recalls the metaphors in the marketing language that is pushed by AI promoters and eagerly lapped up by the misled to reapeat on social media -

It is a tool like the calculator

It is a thinking buddy

Keep the human in the loop

Can you see where it is going?

15/08/2026

Mirena Nalbantova