Profs & Pints Philadelphia: How AI Alters Thinking

Profs and Pints Philadelphia presents: “How AI Alters Thinking,” on dealing with artificial intelligence’s capacity to change and undermine our thought processes, with Eli Alshanetsky, assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University, principle investigator at its Cognitive Integrity Lab, and author of an upcoming book on AI and freedom of thought.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profs-and-pints-black-squirrel/ai-alters-thinking .]

Doctors who give bad advice can be sued for malpractice. Teachers belong to a profession with set standards. When artificial intelligence guides you, however, that guidance comes with a disclaimer: Use at your own risk.

Every day millions of people take that risk, and usually AI seems genuinely helpful. But even if AI gives us good answers, might its use over time do bad things to how we think?

Explore the relationship between AI and our own minds with Eli Alshanetsky, whose Cognitive Integrity Lab studies how artificial intelligence changes how we think, learn, and build trust. Author of Articulating a Thought and the upcoming book Freedom of Thought in the Age of AI, he’s on the cutting edge of efforts to answer AI-related questions such as: How can we tell when work is truly our own? How can technology support rather than replace authorship and reflection? What does trust mean when AI mediates our relationships with others and with our own thoughts?

To set up his discussion of potential consequences of AI, he’ll describe how social media’s impact on society serves as a preview.

Social media didn’t just give people what they wanted to click on, it actually changed what they regarded as click-worthy. It broke attention spans and fueled radicalization across millions of very different people. It left us with people who doom-scroll for hours, who can’t focus, who don’t know what to trust anymore.

If you’d shown people this version of themselves ten years ago, would they have chosen it?

Artificial intelligence is making a similar deal with us, but the stakes are higher. It isn’t chasing clicks. It’s optimized for giving you the most satisfying response to whatever is on your mind right now.

The risk over time isn’t just that you’ll get lazy. More profoundly, even when you think hard, your sense of what counts as good thinking—as well as what sounds like you—will shift to match what AI has been feeding you.

We’ll consider what kind of person this produces and whether this is someone we want to be or want children to become. Professor Alshanetsky will lay out a practical framework, which he calls “the interaction layer,” for using AI without letting it replace the thinking it’s supposed to support. He’ll also talk about what AI-related concerns should be the focus of parents and educators. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 2:30 pm. Talk starts at 3:30.)

Image: Illustration by David S. Soriano / Creative Commons.