Artificial Intelligence... in its Appropriate Place

These days, you can hardly read anything online — or anywhere else, for that matter — without there being some mention of AI as part of the discussion.

Much of that discussion seems to be very doom and gloom oriented and frets about all the negative aspects of AI, while in the next article you come across there will be some reference to a new breakthrough that has been made by AI that brings it closer and closer to consciousness.

As far as I can tell, most of these discussions seem to have their basis in some kind of fear and I struggle to sort out to what degree the fear-laden attitude is simply a way for people to create page views, and to what degree it is authentic fear.

Online content seems to get harder and harder to decipher!

I look at some of the content I see going through the "recent" posts arriving here on Steemit and I recognize that quite a bit of it is created by AI... some of it with a considerable level of sophistication and much of it at a rather crude level.

As contract creators, bloggers and writers we're often very fearful of the possibility that we are going to be replaced by AI because it's one of those things that seems to be able to generate articles much faster than we can and with a great deal more research or accuracy. If done correctly.

The thing that worries me a bit about the AI discussion is the fact that it has a very All-or-Nothing nature. I don't think AI is all bad and I also don't think it's all good. But we easily lose sight of the fact that it has its good and appropriate uses as well as uses that are detrimental.

Let's face it, very few of us want to actually read and consume what is generally referred to as "AI slop," which is clumsily assembled articles and blog posts that don't really offer up anything new or insightful and is likely only there for the purpose of creating words in hopes of getting a few page views. What a waste of time!

On the other hand, consider the value of AI aa a medical diagnostic tool. Not as something to replace doctors but as something to add a bunch of knowledge to a doctor's ability to help a patient. After all, you can feed a patient's symptoms into a AI agent and have immediate access and analysis of millions of case files and white papers that mentioned similar symptoms and in that sense AI can actually save lives.

I say that as someone who has known two people personally who had complex conditions accurately diagnosed by AI, where doctors had failed for decades!

I guess there's always going to be the lingering fear that AI is going to replace a humans altogether as it surpasses our intelligence, but again I think much of that comes from people watching too many Doomsday science fiction movies, and perhaps from some of our own dark biases such as the fear that we are going to become slaves... which perhaps arises from our own tendency to perhaps treat the AI as "just a machine" that we treat like a virtual slave.

Not a pleasant thought, I know, but perhaps closer to the truth than we are comfortable admitting.

In the end, I just hope that humanity has the good sense to realize that AI is great when used in
its appropriate place and bad if it gets misused. But isn't that true of virtually every human tool that has been built over the years?

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

How about YOU? What is your opinion of AI? Do you think it has appropriate uses? Is it something to be afraid of? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2026.06.01 01:32 PDT
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