The Emergence of AI: How Much Progress Is Too Much Progress?

 Progress, or what looks like it, has continued to blossom. Everybody is going digital: the woman who sells onions in the market, shielding herself from the harsh glare of the sun with a rickety umbrella, now owns an Opay account. The school proprietor now has each student’s file uploaded online, no longer has to dig through stacks of files. Technology that was once inconceivable is now, in fact, in bed with us, as though it has always been. The days of cyber cafes, when the internet was a thing put away, is now over. Days of coups and landlines have become history artefacts. Vacuum cleaners now whiz past rugs, making a joke of bygone years of dusting with thick brooms. With aeroplanes and cars and trains one can now reach destinations in time that is mind boggling, if not inconceivable. Gone are the days when one had to go through call centres to reach loved ones. Money, too, now travels with the speed of light. This is progress. This is change. But how far does it have to go before it becomes inimical to our being? When do the very instruments once created for better, easier lives become the bane of our own existence?

In my first semester in university, a bespectacled avuncular professor who rambled and rambled, but still managed to imprint his thoughts—in line with the topic of discussion—on our young eager minds gave an assignment on folktales. It was during the Christmas break, and we were tasked with writing three folktales indigenous to our communities in the language primarily spoken there, then translate to English. One can imagine the bulk of oral literature that efforts like this, if handled seriously, will unearth. One can imagine the wisdom and sense of belonging that will arise from carrying out projects such as this. But that was not the case. Students were, instead, typing prompts into ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and the likes. Those who were able to procure folktales in their indigenous languages or English were feeding their research into Google Translate. The Artificial Intelligence models were producing and regurgitating information in milliseconds. ChatGPT was producing sentences that would have been startlingly beautiful if they weren’t so mechanical. Google Translate was translating literally, context flung off the window. This was the easy terrain. The fast, efficient route. Too comfortable to decline. And so, students were busy at work. Copying and pasting.     

For some, this was due to an inability to go to the village. For those who were able to travel, their parents weren’t forthcoming with the answers they needed. Others, who had been admitted very recently, were in the stumbling and bumbling phase, eager to make up for points they had lost.  

 In his cerebral essay, ‘Literature & Society: The Politics of the Canon’, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes: ‘Culture contact is the oxygen of any civilization. The literature of other peoples is hence important in helping us understand those people and their cultures and in understanding ourselves.’ While this argument was made about the place of African literature in schools, it is again relevant in today’s world as we now delegate most of our thinking, reading and writing to automated machines, to AI. In 2012, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported that Igbo language is now endangered, at risk of going extinct. A good number of people in our society today know very little about who they are and where they come from, no thanks to the ban on the teaching of history. If there has ever been another time to worry about culture contact, it is now, in this new age.  

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Later that semester, my class would receive another assignment that required reading any contemporary novel of choice and ‘commenting’ on that work. We were asked to interpret ‘commenting’ in whatever way we chose. This meant reading a selected piece of fiction, and writing on it in any manner you deemed fit. We had about five weeks for this. But on the submitted sheets—most of which were printed on the morning of submission—were copied and pasted answers from ChatGPT and Meta AI.  

This, too, is progress. It is change. But it begs the question: to what end? With the emergence of AI we are witnessing an increased dearth of thinking, of imagining, of bearing the grunt work. It is in many ways a moral issue, this abandonment of work for AI, but it is so much more; students do not have the guidance on how they can use AI without short-changing themselves and their future. I fear we are on the verge of burdening an already oversaturated job market with graduates who know next to nothing on their supposed area of specialization because of AI, because of progress. 

This is not to say that AI is inherently bad. I, for one, believe it is not. AI boosts productivity, as companies are now able to integrate it in several aspects of their services. The emergence of AI not only saves time and money, but it has also brought information at the forefront, as it is no longer a thing limited to a selected few in esoteric circles. One is now able to learn about topics that have long seemed out of reach with the click of buttons. It is a wonderful, surreal thing. But if we do not begin to educate young people on how to better handle technology, then we just might have another pandemic on our hands.  

It is as though every new improvement is geared towards the reduction of critical thinking and management skills. Attention spans are at an all-time low. Humans are no longer able to power through 200-paged novels, rather seeking immediately gratifying summaries. AI is destroying us.  

The situation is a dire one, made even more so by the lack of serious conversation about the politics of AI. Often it is mentioned as a jab to lazy students, other times as a poke to buy handouts, and most times shrouded in a halo of silence, rendered banal. It is a failing on the part of the institution, this dearth of conversation. However, the onus lies on the students to prepare themselves, to educate themselves, to equip themselves. We must begin to speak about the use of AI, not only as a moral issue, but as a political, economic and social problem. While we may not want to spoon-feed information, we have to begin somewhere, to show this generation that there is a different way of being, and to pave new ways for improved thinking and living for those coming after us. 

Online, folks are arguing on the ethics of AI: how much AI can be employed in creative writing? Does the use of AI make the work any less that of the authors? These arguments are offered on the premise that these creatives know what AI is and what it could mean for the future of storytelling. I fear for the less informed, the young people who have come from far flung villages, who are the first-generation in their families to be university educated. These young people come to school buoyed by lofty dreams of making a name for themselves and their family in a world new to them. They have come to acquire learning, to equip themselves for a better tomorrow. The normalized use of AI is a disservice to them. This silence on all fronts is a colossal failure. 

‘Unlike the popular Google search, ChatGPT processes prompts using deep learning and responds conversationally, the way a human would typically do. While there are concerns about its accuracy, it is now a known fact that Chat GPT and other chatbots are enabling tools that make users more efficient,’ writes Michael Akuchie, for Afrocritik. A recent study by researchers at MIT found that ChatGPT users have the ‘lowest brain engagement’, consistently underperforming in ‘neural, linguistic and behavioural levels.’ It has also now increasingly hard to differentiate virtual from real, human from machine. All these, and AI is yet in its nascent stage. There is still so much more to come. One has to wonder how beneficial this ‘progress’ is as it now seems to harm the very race it was deemed to profit. Perhaps, we have reached a state of diminishing returns?