The darker side of using AI

Ellie Muir has noticed her friends relying on ChatGPT for everything from deciding what’s for lunch to writing work emails. But when one query uses 10 times more energy than a Google search, does our dependency have consequences?

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It's a normal Saturday afternoon in central London, and my friend and I are deciding where to have lunch. I squint around at the nearby cafes, and reel off some of the places I've been to before. My friend, however, is occupied with punching something into her phone. “I just asked ChatGPT," she declares, listing off the bullet-pointed pros and cons of every single eatery that serves “Italian-style sandwiches” in a 100-metre radius. She is pleased with her findings. But I am disappointed, if not a little mortified, that her default move in that extremely low-stakes situation was to ask an AI chatbot. She could have looked on Google, glanced at a Time Out listing, or, I don’t know, used her knowledge of this city (where she’s lived for the past seven years, I might add).

It doesn’t sit well with me. Call me a luddite, but I find myself increasingly concerned about how reliant those around me are becoming on artificial intelligence, particularly OpenAI’s popular generative language model ChatGPT. My closest friends and my partner use the chatbot as an informational crutch on a daily basis, swearing off the humble Google search for ChatGPT’s instantaneous, personalised responses. Some friends use it for mundane queries; my boyfriend uses it as his digital assistant (which he affectionately calls “Chat”). Others take it further: I’ve read worrying stories of people using ChatGPT as their therapist, to help craft responses to their spouse during an argument and students relying on it for school or university assignments as institutions continue to grapple with this new advanced technology.