The entry I was looking for was extracted from a Guardian article on English writer and designer William Morris, a lifelong champion of craftsmanship.
Google had put up Morris-inspired doodles on its home page on the 182nd year of his birthday in 2016, inducing the journalist to ask: “It is fascinating that Google has created its Morris doodle at the same time that it is leading the world in artificial intelligence. How is AI going to change the world of work? Will human work as we know it vanish – and if so, what will people do? A utopian answer might be that all work becomes an art, and human potential is directed to the creation of beauty and happiness instead of mere things.”
Today, his prescient musings have become reality, except that, instead of leaving humanity time for higher-order pursuits, these are what AI seems to be cannibalising first.
Each technological advancement has hardly reduced the hours people commit to their jobs, with companies demanding ever higher levels of efficiency. There remains little appetite to be conscientious about beauty in the average worker.
Add to that a culture of instant gratification that has trained a preference for flat, functional communication instead of layered prose, and people now even prefer the aesthetic of machines to that of their fellow men.
A study at the University of Pittsburgh in 2024 found participants ranking AI-generated poems higher than those by William Shakespeare, Lord Byron and T.S. Eliot. The nail in the coffin? They often assessed that their choices were written by human poets.
In the spirit of thorough inquiry, I played the devil’s advocate. Students at secondary level already use calculators, so why should people limit themselves to the equivalent of an abacus?
Yet there is something about the sacrosanct nature of words, which underlies so much of human nature and society in the form of self-expression, dialogue, law, history, religion and ethics. The universe may be built on numbers, but human consciousness is founded on language.
Descartes’ timeless formulation of radical doubt, “I think, therefore I am”, is not just expressed in words. The very thought he is conscious of is moulded and possible only because of them.
A tool that actively erodes this core tenet of human nature represents a transmogrification of humanity that requires an imagination more expansive than mine to accept.
Part of the reason for the backlash against NLB is the overwhelmingly positive rhetoric at all levels surrounding the use of AI, which has taken over communications, design and outreach activities.
NLB is taking flak because it should be the custodian of books, human knowledge and literacy, especially critical when adult literacy levels here are subpar and worsening.
Since then, chief librarian Gene Tan has said that using AI with the permission of authors has helped to engage more than 2.5 million people, and that creative writing workshops using AI form just 4 per cent of NLB’s courses.
If anything comes of this furore, it should be that clearer direction and public communication are needed. Singapore cannot walk into an AI future with its eyes wide shut; a post-AI society would have no need for libraries anyway.
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