Narayani Ganesh

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is omnipresent. Many think it is omniscient and omnipotent, too. Anyway, there’s no escape. Much like Santa Claus or Father Christmas. Both create magic – Santa fires the imagination, instils hope of goodness, peace and harmony and embodies generosity, charity, goodness and celebration. AI, too, fires the imagination, enables gleaning essential information but AI is neutral like any other technology, so it does not promote any of the virtues and values that Santa does as a keeper of conscience.

AI has no emotion, no feeling. It just doles out what was put in, in the format and manner in which you ask for.

Two decades ago, in 2006, Finnair, to flag off their inaugural flight service from India to Finland, invited a few journalists and took us to also visit the office of Santa Claus, in Rovaniemi, in Lapland, in the Finnish Arctic Circle. It was a make-believe world of fantasy, mythology and magic. To meet Santa, “in flesh and blood”, and experience the workings of the post office that received more than 60,000 letters, from children across the world, was a dreamy experience. “Every letter is replied to,” Santa informed us, as we watched Santa’s workforce sorting mail, country-wise.

Some twenty years later, in Norway’s Narvik in the Arctic Circle area, a large data centre is under construction in a valley surrounded by ice and snow-capped mountains and freezing fjords. The magic of Rovaniemi is absent, it is all dark and grey. The data centre is one among 800 such centres coming up across the world, all to service AI, the super-duper poker-faced, robotic Santa in the digital era. As a potential tourist destination, it will be nothing like Santa’s post office in the Arctic. The AI magic is what one associates with an Alexa or robotic house help, not the kind of magic one associates with Santa.

AI can be dangerous. Most users ignore the disclaimer that comes with every chatbot or other large language models: “The content may contain errors or biases.” By contrast, Santa is harmless. His very existence is a disclaimer of sorts; everyone is conscious of this and no one minds.

At a recent conference on ‘Dialogues for Harmony’ hosted by the Azim Premji Foundation at AP University, Bengaluru, participant Harmeet Shah Singh, communication and advocacy director of United Sikhs, UK, was speaking in a session on ‘Seva as the foundation for community and interreligious harmony’. He went hammer and tongs at AI: “Mark my words,” he said. “Three years from now, AI will destroy everything.”

Harmeet Singh said he asked AI for certain verses from the Gurbani and it promptly provided several, based on the topic in question. On closer examination, when Singh tried to cross-check with Gurbani sources, he found that AI had fabricated all the verses and passed them off as Gurbani. “Is this acceptable?” he thundered. Well, this is tricky. Imagine AI doling out spurious health advice or telling you how to deal with relationship issues. Could be disastrous. Yet, undeniably, AI tools have made sifting information from tomes and mounds of material less difficult, provided one cross-checks the veracity of such AI-generated content.

Neither Santa nor AI need to be trashed. They have their place so long as we know what their place is and we keep them there and not let them take over our lives.

END OF ARTICLE