By Tracy Zwick
Given the recent ominous news about AI 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 AI 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. “AI 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 AI 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 AI,” and he misses out on the joy that comes with solving.
Despite the downsides, he uses AI “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. AI gives me well-tuned emails. I don’t need to spend time wordsmithing.”
He does worry that the current safeguards on AI 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 AI
Kristen, a 50-something UWS music teacher, doesn’t have mixed feelings about AI. “I hate everything about it,” she said. “I’ve never used it. I don’t use social media either. I think AI is making the world a worse place.”
She reported being asked to write letters of recommendation weekly and refusing to even consider turning to AI. “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 AI assistant
Liz, an UWS mom of a middle schooler, views AI 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. AI 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 AI how to make the granola healthier, it gave her a “zillion” options.
Her son, meanwhile, is anti AI. 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 AI. 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 AI 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 AI to write her medical notes, assessments, or plans, as some doctors do. She feels that when using AI, 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 AI 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 AI write you an email and yours writes me back, then what’s the point of anything?”
A former pharmacist who’s cautiously delighted by AI
Rita, a 50-something UWSer who is trained as a pharmacist, uses AI 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 AI’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 AI. They prefer YouTube, social media, and blogs for restaurant recommendations and trip planning. When asked their concern level about AI 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 AI. She’d recently seen Bill Maher excoriate AI leaders, and, she said, make a claim that “we have maybe four years left of humanity.” She reported that she did not use AI “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 AI 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 AI,” and he 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 AI 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 AI 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.”
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Aye Yai Yai — Super Intelligence — we brought this on ourselves. Throw your devices away, leave your thumbs alone, look up, smell the roses — well, maybe too late! Remember how people used to say GET A LIFE?!!!
We still get a life. We use AI for work.
My UWS doctors office just started using an AI registration system which is asking me to give it all my medical history, which the office already has. After several questionable experiences that I was willing to overlook, AI was the straw that broke the camels back to switch practices because how, as a medical practice, can you condone using a product with such adverse effects to the long term health and wellbeing of humanity.
Then again, doctors used to say smoking was fine too when they got paid by the companies…
Please don’t confuse a specific bad implementation of AI with AI in general. My doctor’s office has an AI assistant that gets stuck in a loop, and it’s incredibly annoying. But that’s a problem with how they’re using AI, not with AI itself. It’s like saying computers are bad because some programs are terrible.
Using AI for something is a dead giveaway that the task is unimportant and doesn’t need to be done.
Or that the tasker is not up to the job.
Absolutely not true. In my profession, a lot of project layers and tasks that are extremely important are now done by AI, and the results are so much better compared with when they were done by individuals.
Good point – I’m thinking more of situations where someone uses AI to write something, like a bio, a speech, an email. The end result is so boring – I can almost always tell it was AI.
There are UWS block associations and community groups that specialize in AI!
Looks like a lot of these comments are coming from people who have no experience with AI, or have only used it very superficially, and are judging it mostly by what they’ve heard. The irony is that they’re probably already benefiting from AI without even realizing it – in fraud detection, medical imaging, navigation, translation, search, and countless behind-the-scenes business processes – while continuing to bash “AI” as a whole.
Well put.
The avalanche has already started. It’s too late for the pebbles to complain.
Been there done that,
I remember when fire and the wheel were discovered.
Seen this before with the Steam Engine,
Seems like 5 seconds ago we had the “Horseless Carriage” Riots.
AI is here to stay no matter your opinion, folks. There are simply too many potential benefits (health care breakthroughs, accelerated innovation, business and even government efficiencies, etc). Sure there are dangers, and they need to be managed just like those associated with any scientific breakthrough. But no amount of complaining is going to put the genie back in the bottle.
These comments remind me of the early days of the web: “The internet is useless. There’s nothing there. I don’t need a computer. I don’t need a smartphone.”
It feels very similar now. A lot of people have barely used AI, if at all, but have already decided it’s useless or bad simply because they don’t see what it can do.
There’s definitely a certain rigidity in the thinking of a good percentage of the readers here. They’ve already made up their minds, and no argument or evidence is likely to change them.
so, is this conservative population or progressive?
I have a question: how many of the commenters here trashing AI – sometimes while confusing it with smartphones usage or googling – were strong proponents of the COVID-19 vaccines and attacked anyone who was hesitant?
Because here’s the irony: AI and machine learning were used in COVID vaccine development. They helped with things like analyzing viral and immune data, identifying vaccine targets, designing and optimizing mRNA sequences, and processing enormous amounts of clinical-trial data. Moderna used AI and automation in its mRNA work, while Pfizer used machine learning to analyze and clean trial data far faster than traditional methods.
So chances are, some of the people now declaring that AI is inherently dangerous were perfectly comfortable trusting something whose rapid development benefited from AI.
Please stop writing logical comments that make sense.
It upsets people.
Great article! I attended a conference session recently at Climate Week NYC and in one remarkable session debating the pros and cons of scaling AI for business, both the audience and the AI interpreter who synthesized the conversation agreed overwhelmingly that more guardrails are needed before AI can safely be scaled.
Madoff was a pretty good argument for more guardrails in finance. It wasn’t an argument against finance. Same principle here.
I had a medical appointment at Mt. Sinai Doctors on W. 57 St. I looked on my portal a few days later where I noticed in small print on the bottom, “the use of AI was thoroughly discussed with the patient at the start of the appointment.” “Patient gave consent”.
This was a complete lie, the issue was never brought up.
fyi, a patient has the right to ask a medical provider at the start of an appointment if an AI system is being used. If you’re told yes but you don’t want it, you have the right to withhold consent.
Even if you’re ok with AI , it’s a good idea (& you have the right) to ask to review the medical notes in the office before they’re entered into your record. There’s a chance you’ll find some factual errors & misinterpretation of info.
In my case, I found several. Sometimes minor mistakes, sometimes not. .
There’s a lot of things in mt Sinai ‘records’ in my experience that were absolutely not ever discussed with me. Most of it is unimportant, but as a pattern it’s certainly concerning
“…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 AI. They prefer YouTube, social media, and blogs for restaurant recommendations and trip planning”
I really want to know what the author actually asked them. YouTube, social media and blogs aren’t alternatives to AI. So what was the question that produced this answer?