Dear Editor,

Artificial intelligence poses a great threat to our planet, and the rate at which it has evolved and become so widely accepted should alarm everyone. It is not just a fun tool to play around with or, many times inaccurately, answer questions. AI causes air pollution and uses a sizeable amount of water to power its sources. This speeds up climate change dramatically and frighteningly.

The effects of climate change are not the same for everyone, though. Poor communities, regions with higher populations of racial minorities, and immigrant neighborhoods are going to experience the contaminated water and polluted air before white upper- and middle-class people do. We must denounce the use of AI before it’s too late for all of us.

If climate change isn’t something you believe in, you can look at the impacts of AI on older generations, women, and students. Older adults are more likely to fall for misinformation and thus less likely to trust something they read online.

As we all know, the internet has never been the most reliable source, but for a quick question it can be handy. I’m sure we have all seen the consequences of AI for women: using an image generator to create lewd images and videos of them. This is extremely harmful to the wellbeing of those individuals and their families, but it is so easily accessible for everyone that it’s almost impossible to stop. Meanwhile, AI has made plagiarism so much easier and harder to spot. Students can type a prompt into ChatGPT and receive their entire assignment in response. They can then change a few sentences to make it sound like their writing, and then they submit it.

The purpose of school is to learn, to challenge yourself, to expand your horizons, to use critical thinking; AI takes that all away. Students will be entering the world ill-prepared for careers and lacking essential knowledge, and these are people that will become doctors, lawyers, teachers, government officials, and other important members of our society.

If you agree that the use AI is ruining our planet and hurting the people on it, please do research and do your best to avoid interacting with AI. Help others recognize it and tell them about the harmful impacts it has already had. Please don’t let this creation become more widespread and take the humanity out of the Earth.

Mollie Hamilton

Flushing