I believe AI is an evolutionary tool for humans, enabling us to increase our efficiency and gather data in a meaningful and coherent manner. It shrinks down the time needed for futile work and scanning through tons and tons of irrelevant information, providing us with readymade lists of information and data. Apart from that, a crucial role AI plays now is by enhancing and even replacing human creativity in providing ideas for arguments, opinions, and thoughts.

Our reliance on using AI to speak our minds and generate opinions has deprived us of our abilities of critical and creative thinking. We no longer think outside the box and consider our ideas more valuable than those of AI, doubting our skills to be inferior to AI, and relenting to develop or grow our mindsets further. We’re sometimes limiting ourselves to our past creations and knowledge by relying on what’s provided by AI, viewing it as a higher power with authority and superiority when in fact it’s just a model created and with data powered and provided by us. This undermines our potential in actualising innovative and new ideas that can only come from humans.

Apart from text, the emergence of AI artworks and videos has deepened our reliance on fast-fashion style creativity and a uniform style of art. The loss of individualism and the uniformity enforced in artworks now has strongly disheartened me as an artist, especially the lesser-known side effects of artists being wrongly accused of AI and having to prove their legitimacy for mere doubts with no evidence. The general public’s lack of understanding of how AI works and what AI-generated products look like can cause significant demotivation in people who genuinely want to create meaningful content from their interests or for greater purposes. This significantly undermines fairness and human dignity for content creators and creates an overall detrimental impact on those who live life through utilising their creativity.

I feel like we’re losing a sense of empathy when interacting with AIs who have no emotional response like humans do. Our ability to connect and empathize is slowly deteriorating when we fall into the rabbit hole of thinking that only AI can be a perfect listener who responds according to our tastes and converses at our pace but we ignore the need for ourselves to be able to socialise at someone else’s pace or listen to someone else’s stories.

The heart of philanthropy comes from the motivation and calling for us to close our mouths and listen to the stories of the world. To understand distinct cultures, challenges, and lifestyles, to acknowledge our privilege, and the reason why we are granted those privileges. From a liberalist perspective, our privileges exist to help us understand why we shouldn’t need them and why we should be obliged to help others who don’t have the same conditions, although it’s not indeed an obligation. The awakening and calling for us to empathize with challenges in our neighbourhood and employ philanthropy as a lifestyle should be something we all strive for throughout our lives, no matter what route we take. Social justice and philanthropy aren’t just slogans or distant concepts that we sometimes remember from the back of our head or participate for the sake of our own status or reputation. The real meaning comes from the compassion and connection between human hearts, where we’re all interconnected and interdependent in this globalised world. This is why AI shouldn’t replace the most important aspect of us as human beings, the ability to reflect emotionally on our environment and surroundings. It’s vital for us to look out around us, to keep ourselves emotionally and physically connected in the real world, where challenges take place, where help is needed.