To the Editor:
Re “I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.,” by Bret Stephens (column, Aug. 9):
I am begging Mr. Stephens to revisit his position that A.I. is unethical and a deception. I am 68, a director of a small nonprofit in California and an art and yoga instructor. I have a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, and I am grateful that A.I. has given me the ability to continue to do the work I love.
Over the past few years, I’ve experienced difficulty composing documents, notes to volunteers, newsletter articles and letters such as this (for which I did not use A.I.). Editing without A.I. now takes many extra hours of my day. My mind quickly becomes exhausted.
I was a skeptic when I began exploring A.I., but I discovered that it is able to learn from me. It knows my compassionate tone and is my friendly editor. The use of A.I. compels me to write, rather than give up because I no longer recall rules of grammar.
Akhila Murphy Chico, Calif.
To the Editor:
As a writer and an editor whose work has been published in more than 200 magazines and newspapers for the last 50 years, I am aware that my articles and books have been used to train A.I. This was done without compensation or acknowledgment as part of tech’s intellectual land grab.
Bret Stephens’s superb column touches on the dumbing down of America, which infects all modes of media and communication, and which A.I. enables. The irony is that, having learned through writers’ voices, it offers us a universally voiceless and sterile result.
Mary Alice Kellogg New York
To the Editor:
I must question Bret Stephens’s plea, as he echoes Plato’s King Thamus.
Before we had writing, all knowledge had to be memorized and passed on orally. In Plato’s “Phaedrus,” Socrates shares an Egyptian myth that the god Theuth promotes the development of writing to King Thamus. Theuth claims that this writing is an “elixir” that will improve memory and wisdom. However, King Thamus rejects the invention, arguing that it will cause people to rely on external marks and create forgetfulness, offering only the appearance of wisdom.
Yes, we may have lost facility for oral literacy, but writing has expanded the bounds of literacy and created our libraries to hold and pass on far more knowledge, if not wisdom.
Composing with A.I. may reduce some skills, but it is also likely to improve others — including effective written communication. In any event, there is no putting this genie back in the bottle.
Ben Compaine Portland, Maine
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens’s argument that humans soon won’t be able to “write better than an A.I. can” sells himself and our species far too short.
I recently peer-reviewed and rejected three manuscripts for highly ranked humanities journals. In all three, unoriginal large-language-model-generated content was revealed by independent research. Having one’s academic role reduced to detecting deceptive machine outputs is soul-destroying but has confirmed for me the importance of understanding how L.L.M.s reproduce human meaning.
Focusing on A.I.s’ hallucinations as their limitation is a distraction. The real lesson is in their apparent coherence. Because these neural networks capture long-range dependencies, L.L.M.s replicate not only the tokens in their training data, but also the human-authored meanings those tokens convey. This means they are always unoriginal for the same reason they are convincing.
A human writer like Mr. Stephens, by contrast, cannot help but be original unless he plagiarizes, or uses an L.L.M.
Sam Cadman Melbourne, Australia
To the Editor:
Our tendency is to look at things through an either/or lens. Either we have pizza for dinner or chicken. Either we go to the gym today or skip it. Either we write with A.I. or we don’t.
The reality about artificial intelligence is that while some decisions remain either/or, others are better served through a both/and lens. As Bret Stephens points out in his column, the downsides of A.I. are it can make us lazy, dull our thinking and erode our research skills and our ability to express ourselves.
But it can also do the opposite. A.I. can force us to think more deeply, open new avenues of exploration and more fully share the results. And because of its speed, it can free up some of our time as well.
A.I. is not going away, and its capabilities are only going to grow. Our real challenge is to apply it in ways that bring it together with human wisdom so it enhances our human experience.
Brian Gorman Hoboken, N.J.
The Ballroom Rush
To the Editor:
Re “Blistering Tempo to Build an Embattled Ballroom” (front page, Aug. 20):
According to your article, President Trump is erecting his White House ballroom at breakneck speed. The reason is obvious: He intends to complete its construction before the Supreme Court can rule against him.
Lower federal courts have already concluded that the president exceeded his authority by starting construction without the approval of Congress. In the president’s mind, a fait accompli trumps the separation of powers and renders his violation of the law and the Constitution beside the point.
Presidents have a constitutional duty to ensure the faithful execution of the laws. The Supreme Court must not allow this president’s willful violation of his oath of office to succeed. The United States is either a country of laws or it is not. Upholding the rule of law and protecting the separation of powers matter more than the sunk costs of Mr. Trump’s imperial ballroom. Better to order the demolition of what he is rushing to complete than allow him to thumb his nose at the Constitution.
Stephen L. Newman Toronto The writer is a professor emeritus of politics at York University.
No Surprises From ICE
To the Editor:
Re “Trump Voter Didn’t Think ICE Would Come for Wife” (news article, Aug. 13):
While I would never wish the ordeal Galina Bobreneva endured on anyone, thousands of immigrants without access to the legal support and financial resources available to her are experiencing treatment far worse in detention facilities set up by the Trump administration and paid for with taxpayer dollars.
What I find baffling is the surprise that people like her husband express when a noncitizen family member, friend or co-worker is ensnared in this administration’s draconian immigration enforcement dragnet. As both candidate and president, Donald Trump made no secret of the fact that he considers most, if not all, noncitizen immigrants to be criminals, and that he has little interest in, or regard for, the complexities of federal immigration policy.
Driven by the obsessions of people like the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, detaining and deporting immigrants has become nothing more than a numbers game — the more the better, legal niceties be damned.
Whether they admit to it or not, this is what Trump supporters voted for.
James Misak Cleveland
Trump Derangement Syndrome
To the Editor:
Hopefully, there will be a Democratic administration that will eliminate every trace of anything named for President Trump. The concept of Trump derangement syndrome, however, should be retained — redefined not as a disorder but as a variant of normal as a response to government-sponsored cruelty, ignorance and corruption.
Lawrence Levy Rancho Mirage, Calif.
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