By Tracy Zwick
Given the recent ominous news about A.I. breaches, systems going rogue, and the possibility of superintelligence wiping out humankind, West Side Rag hit the streets Tuesday to ask Upper West Siders how they’re feeling about A.I. and how they’re using it, or not.
A worried tech worker who sees both sides
“I’m definitely concerned,” an UWS dad of school-aged boys who works in tech told WSR. “A.I. models are experts in biochemistry and programming and statistical analysis, and they can do a lot of work really fast. That results in a lot of power to potentially do things like destabilize financial markets and create bioweapons,” he said.
He feels the same tension when he uses A.I. in his work. It makes him more productive, he reported, but also makes work “less fun.”
“One of the things I like about programming and writing software is that I get to solve challenging problems,” he explained. “A lot of that work now gets delegated to A.I.,” and he misses out on the joy that comes with solving.
Despite the downsides, he uses A.I. “constantly,” he said, and not just at work. It’s made managing a division of his son’s UWS soccer league easier: “There are some complicated parents, and if I wrote email responses, they’d have a rough edge. A.I. gives me well-tuned emails. I don’t need to spend time wordsmithing.”
He does worry that the current safeguards on A.I. are “not consistent or effective,” saying the government should be coordinating the effort, but “isn’t doing that very well right now.”
A conscientious violinist, eschewing A.I.
Kristen, a 50-something UWS music teacher, doesn’t have mixed feelings about A.I. “I hate everything about it,” she said. “I’ve never used it. I don’t use social media either. I think A.I. is making the world a worse place.”
She reported being asked to write letters of recommendation weekly and refusing to even consider turning to A.I. “That would be dishonest,” she said. “I use my own words and my own thoughts.”
She does use internet search tools for things like “directions and recipes,” but added, “It’s not a good idea for a computer to think for us.”
An efficient mom and her A.I. assistant
Liz, an UWS mom of a middle schooler, views A.I. not as an existential threat but an extremely capable personal assistant. “I totally use it,” she said.
It helped plan her son’s bar mitzvah, and serves as an expert guide through the labyrinth of applying to NYC high schools. Her son has an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which makes things even more complicated. A.I. suggested ways for her to navigate an often not-very-responsive bureaucracy, and gave her concrete timelines.
“I treat it like a friend who’s incredibly knowledgeable about everything,” Liz said.
She also uses it for the kinds of things she once would have Googled: “Coffee places in Soho,” for example, or a granola recipe from the Post Ranch Inn. When she asked A.I. how to make the granola healthier, it gave her a “zillion” options.
Her son, meanwhile, is anti-A.I. She hopes to help him “figure out that there are safe and helpful ways to use it.”
And she has limits. Liz wouldn’t share personal financial information with A.I.. She added: “Do I think they should regulate it? Yes. Do I know how they should regulate it? No.”
A doctor trying to avoid passivity
Barbara, an UWS doctor, has a different concern: not what A.I. might become, but what it might do to us. “It’s so passive!” she said. “You just type something in and read the response, and it seems like it makes sense, and you can almost think you came up with those thoughts, but you didn’t.”
She doesn’t use A.I. to write her medical notes, assessments, or plans, as some doctors do. She feels that when using A.I., medical professionals aren’t always “forced to think things through.” She added that, as a doctor, “you need to have some intrinsic knowledge and experience to know what questions to ask a patient.”
Barbara “definitely” worries that A.I.’will lead to catastrophic outcomes,.“But, more immediately,” she said, “I’m worried about the effect [it will have] on society and how we interact with each other. If I have my A.I. write you an email and yours writes me back, then what’s the point of anything?”
A former pharmacist who’s cautiously delighted by A.I.
Rita, a 50-something UWSer who is trained as a pharmacist, uses A.I .to answer medical questions and, importantly, for making sourdough bread. Her husband, a surgeon, pays for ChatGPT premium, and talks to “her” enough that when he asks Rita a question, she sometimes tells him, “Ask your girlfriend.”
“It’d be crazy not to be scared,” Rita said of A.I.’s potential dangers. But she also thinks its spread is inevitable, and that its medical possibilities are extraordinary. “I think we’re lucky to have it more than I’m fearful.”
Twenty-something creatives and older library patrons are skeptical
Not everyone sees anything to be lucky about. A man and woman in their 20s who work in the arts, encountered outside Westside Market on Broadway near 98th Street, said they don’t use A.I.. They prefer YouTube, social media, and blogs for restaurant recommendations and trip planning. When asked their concern level about A.I. getting beyond human control, the man put it succinctly: “High”.
A gray-haired woman wearing a “Cat Lady” button at the NYPL’s Morningside Heights branch was equally direct: “I hate it!” she said, referring to A.I. She’d recently seen Bill Maher excoriate A.I. leaders, and, she said, make a claim that “we have maybe four years left of humanity.” She reported that she did not use A.I. “at all”.
Some Columbia students are unafraid
A California-based junior at Columbia, an economics major with a family in tech, said he’s “not at all” concerned about the prospect of A.I. becoming exponentially more intelligent. He chatted with WSR while walking along Amsterdam Avenue near campus, reporting that he uses Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT to turn his class slides into lessons. He said “pretty much everybody at Columbia is using A.I.,” and regards people who are deeply fearful of it as “doomers.”
WSR met a Columbia freshman from Canada at a bubble tea shop near campus. She said she uses A.I. to build her calendar, and work through practice problems for school. Her level of concern, on a scale of one to 10: four.
A practical outlook on speculative risks
Liz, the recipe-optimizing, bar-mitzvah planning mom, was perhaps the most clear-eyed voice in our street-level sample. At the end of our chat, I posed the concern that’s been leading stories across all media recently: Was she worried that A.I. might destroy the world and eventually kill us all?
“It might!” she said. “But I can’t control that. I’m using it for my micro-purposes. If it kills us, it’s not gonna be because I’m looking for a granola recipe.”
Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.
