Authentic intelligence rises with Al

As the cognitive power and proliferation of artificial intelligence take the world by storm, the case for authenticity and originality paradoxically becomes more compelling and carries higher premiums.

- Thitinan Pongsudhirak

It is now a widely accepted reality that AI is on its way to master human thought processes and proceed beyond them. This means that it will be more difficult for humans to differentiate between what comes from AI and what does not. As such, the time has come after nearly 40 years of being published — including more than 25 of them with this newspaper — that this column goes subjective.

I have long wanted to write in the first person, but Jerry Petrini, my ninth-grade teacher, admonished me otherwise. Mr Petrini taught me to write in the third person. Who was I to write subjectively as “me”! He said never write in first person because it’s not about you but about the content of your composition. This was a time way before the contemporary era of I, myself, and me.

It was also a time when I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a thin but dense and difficult book, which somehow activated me into a thinking person for the first time. It was a passageway to other novels and books, and the likability of reading. Mr Petrini also made me memorise by rote 20 vocabulary words every week to be quizzed on Fridays. Many words have proved useful, such as authenticity, but some have hardly been used, like pusillanimous and non sequitur. However, I would know these when I see them.