“This AI writes better than I do!” I hear that sentence at least three times a week. From a marketing director dazzled by ChatGPT. From a graphic designer captivated by Midjourney. From a student who has just discovered that a machine can solve his maths exercises in seconds.
And every time, I tell myself: we have just crossed an invisible line.
Not the line of technical performance; that is just computing doing what it has always done: calculating quickly and well. No, we have just crossed the line of our own devaluation. The one where we begin to doubt our most human abilities: thinking, creating, deciding.
As a mathematician who works with AI every day, I see three great mythological narratives being built before our eyes. Three seductive stories that gradually make us give up something precious: our intellectual autonomy.
The problem is not that AI is too capable. It is that we are becoming too credulous.
In what follows, I suggest we unpick together these three myths that are silently redrawing the borders of our humanity. Because before knowing what AI can do, it is high time to remember what we, for our part, do not want to lose.
Ready for a little exercise in collective clear-sightedness?
Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: AI myths and their power of dispossession
