Last Saturday, one football game produced a result that can best be described as “delicious.” Ole Miss beat LSU. Now that is an old and historic rivalry, but that is not what made this game so special. In recent years, the University of Mississippi (my birthplace!), has seen its football fortunes rise under the coaching of Lane Kiffin. Last year they had a legit shot at the national championship. But then LSU put obscene amounts of cash on the table and hired Kiffin away as the regular season ended and the playoffs began. Kiffin had to be secreted out of Oxford on a private jet while fans jeered him from the fence line. Then once at LSU, he tried to add failed NFL players to his roster causing the conference to threaten to expel the school. Ole Miss beating LSU this past weekend was justice and revenge in a very sweet and satisfying casserole. And interestingly, A.I. played a role in the drama.
Turns out Kiffin used AI for legal advice when he was making his decisions about those NFL guys. You gotta laugh. Said one of Kiffin’s confidants to ESPN, “‘Eventually I told him that a guy with a $91 million contract ought to have a top-notch lawyer on speed dial and not be using ChatGPT for legal advice,’ Mars said.” Now, you have to laugh harder. Money and common sense do not always travel together. But the real take-away here is how dangerously close A.I. came to subversively destroying the entire LSU athletic endeavor – and it was not even trying to do so.
Last week, when AI was all anybody could talk about, I wrote, “Once A.I. is our only friend and we each live in our little, isolated bubble with that fake friend, well, then A.I. has won.” Well, it turns out A.I.’s subversive effects may be more pernicious than I thought. This morning Arthur Brooks argues that turning writing over to A.I. robs us of happiness. I could not agree more. Writes Brooks:
Writing leads to happiness for a simple reason: It satisfies the human need to create something concrete and meaningful out of raw materials. This is the central argument of Matthew B. Crawford’s famous 2009 book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which explained that skilled manual work is deeply satisfying because it connects thinking and effort to objective reality. Putting this ethic into practice, one of the editors of this column, Matt Seaton, splits his time professionally between working with words and handcrafting mortarless stone walls in Vermont, which he sees as similarly soul-satisfying processes. In his words, “To me, the distinction commonly made between working with the brain and by hand is a false opposition. The most meaningful things we do almost always reflect a unity of the manual and the intellectual—after all, even our ‘digital’ technologies originated with counting on fingers.” The raw materials in writing are amorphous ideas, which the writing process turns into something as coherent and permanent as a wall of stone.
That is a fascinating parallel to my retired life which is split pretty evenly between writing here and woodworking. Brooks has mastered the psychology here, but there is a spiritual dimension he does not discuss. We first encounter the God of the Bible creating, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God made us in His image. Creativity is an expression of that image and when we fall in line with how we were created and intended to be, we touch the divine.
You ever notice how handcrafts someone made for you are more precious than something you bought at the store, even if the handcraft is of slightly lesser quality? Now you know why. Most people attribute that effect to the handcraft being “full of love.” It is, and that love comes straight from God and His image in us. Such a gift bestows a touch of the heavenly.
A.I. is a tool that properly used it will enrich our lives, but relied upon as a substitute for the work God created us to do it will subvert our very nature – no Terminator necessary.
