In the year or so since ChatGPT gave most of us our first exposure to generative artificial intelligence, many writers have reached for metaphors by which to explain this bewildering new experience. Is it sentient? Is it a parrot? Is it a user-friendly, commercially adaptable herald of the apocalypse?
After playing around with the technology for a while, trying to figure out what it could and could not be made to do, the writer Elizabeth Spiers struck on a different way of thinking about it: "It is common to describe A.I. as being 'in its infancy,' but I think that's not quite right," she wrote in a guest essay last weekend. "A.I. is in the phase when kids live like tiny energetic monsters, before they've learned to be thoughtful about the world and responsible for others."
Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, based this conclusion in part on experiences with her son. He has made a few appearances in her previous writing — as a newborn in this essay about breastfeeding, as a child wondering about wildfire smoke in an essay earlier this month about the troubling absence of snow and as a welcome reality check in an essay about public figures' unsatisfying apologies: "Even my 8-year-old son knows the difference between a desultory eye-rolling 'sorry' and genuine remorse."
To a wide range of topics ranging from banking to football and marriage, Spiers has brought a distinctive outlook that is always sharp, sometimes acerbic, never sentimental. These qualities place her work at odds with much writing about motherhood. But they position her perfectly to write about parenting an emerging technology, a task she sees as the responsibility — however regrettable — of society at this moment. "The more accessible large language model applications become, the more possible it will be to enable them to parse moral dilemmas," she observes. "The tech will become more mature, in both senses. But for now, it still needs adult supervision, and whether the adults in the room are equipped to do that is up for debate."
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