Every period of human history that has brought about massive shifts in transformative technology has arrived wearing a double face. The Industrial Revolution promised prosperity while fueling brutal factory labor. The internet democratized information while accelerating confusion and online scams. Social media connected families while contributing to loneliness, polarization, and misinformation. Artificial intelligence appears to be following in this same historical pattern, but at a pace unlike anything we’ve witnessed.
There is no longer a question around whether AI will change humanity. It already has. The more difficult question is whether the people and institutions guiding AI’s development can evolve as quickly as this Janus-faced technology itself. It is ultimately the responsibility of every person to decide which of its two faces it will wear going forward.
The idea of Janus-faced truths stems from the mythology of the Roman god Janus, whose head bore two faces, and presided over thresholds: new beginnings and endings. This god also governed war and peace and was invoked during times of great change.
Humanity is facing a time of great change, with Artificial Intelligence appearing ubiquitously in our lives, seemingly without anyone asking for it. Every email server and customer service hotline now has a chatbot offering its “help,” making it increasingly difficult to reach a human who can better understand the nuances of a specific question. Even straightforward internet searches now require adding “-AI,” otherwise the top result may be an AI-generated summary of everything known about a topic, whether factually verified or not. Accessing peer-reviewed studies and hard-copy research is becoming increasingly difficult, making it imperative that individuals take responsibility for fact-checking the information they encounter online amid the overwhelming presence of “AI slop.”
You’ll hear people touting the advantages of AI, arguing that it doesn’t replace human intelligence but amplifies it. A physician can review more research before making a diagnosis. A teacher can personalize lessons for 30 students rather than teaching to the average. Scientists can analyze protein structures, climate simulations, and astronomical data in hours instead of years. Small businesses gain capabilities once reserved for multinational corporations.
For artists, proponents argue that AI lowers technical barriers. Someone with compelling ideas but limited drawing ability can visualize concepts. Independent filmmakers can create visual effects that once required millions of dollars. Writers can brainstorm, organize research, or explore alternate drafts without waiting for collaborators. And tools that lower the cost of creation often increase the total amount of art produced. After all, photography didn’t eliminate painting, and computers didn’t eliminate writers.
Yes, that’s one face. But if we look at the other side, we discover something different. Consider the cost of this lower barrier to entry for arts, education, and productivity. What is the human, economic, and environmental toll of easy access to “intelligence”?
Comparisons are drawn between the advent of Artificial Intelligence and the Industrial Revolution, where work moved from fields to factories, creating more jobs (despite terrible working conditions). However, AI has stolen jobs because it rendered the humans who once performed those tasks useless. An estimated 175,000 U.S. positions have been lost to AI and automation since tracking began in 2023—and that’s just the jobs that have been officially reported. According to economists, that number could increase to over 10 million by 2030. Here again, advocates will say that productivity revolutions always redistribute work before they create new work, but where are these new jobs?
Some discussions place the focus on factory automation jobs. But AI increasingly affects professions long considered resistant to automation: accountants, translators, graphic designers, customer service representatives, paralegals, junior programmers, journalists, and even some medical specialists.
Unlike previous industrial revolutions, AI targets cognitive labor; specifically, the work many societies encouraged people to pursue precisely because it seemed secure. Whether AI becomes broadly enriching or economically destabilizing may depend less on the technology than on education, labor policy, taxation, and corporate governance.
Childhood education faces growing concern over AI tools in grade schools. These programs enter classrooms with little oversight and unclear data collection practices. In Utah, new AI technology is being rolled out in public schools this year. Nationally, the possibility of a humanoid robot named “Plato” was presented as an in-home teacher for children, sparking concerns from the education community. Even as First Lady Melania Trump concluded her statement about this robotic future, she warned that “optimism must be weighed with caution.”
For students lacking educational resources, an AI tutor that can explain algebra ten different ways without frustration and remain available around the clock can be transformative. But the same systems can also backfire. Chatbots are now completing essays and homework assignments and reducing a student’s cognitive development by removing opportunities for them to acquire persistence, reasoning, and even basic writing skills. This is dangerous for the future of our society.
Educators face mounting challenges. They must teach critical thinking, keep students engaged against social media distractions, and grade work while detecting AI use.
At first glance, the healthcare sector may also appear to benefit greatly from the advent of AI. Machine learning systems already assist in interpreting medical images, identifying drug candidates, summarizing clinical notes, predicting patient deterioration, and expanding access to basic medical information.
Yet, AI models reflect biases in historical medical data and can be programmed to systematically deny coverage across the board, without considering the varied and nuanced nature of individual human health histories. AI models consistently produce confident but incorrect recommendations, and privacy concerns surrounding sensitive health information remain significant.
However, no area provokes stronger emotional reactions than the use of AI in art. Currently, AI systems are trained on vast collections of human-created work without adequate permission or compensation. The internet is awash with stories from creators about bots crawling their websites, stealing their intellectual property, and then mass-producing their art.
Artists and writers worry that their individual styles, painstakingly developed over decades, can now be imitated within seconds. These concerns are neither imaginary nor trivial. New “artistic tools” appear every day, and artists worry that these tools now diminish “real” creativity.
Despite photography, digital editing tools, and computer animation having all faced similar skepticism upon their advent, the difference with AI is that it imitates aspects of creativity itself rather than merely expanding an artist’s physical technique. It’s not creating anything new or unique; it’s regurgitating what already exists. The “smooth brain” experience of writing or creating with AI does little to enrich an individual’s life. Why take the time to develop your unique voice or artistic style when you can plug a prompt into a bot and have it spit out something you could market within hours?
This reasoning becomes truly problematic when we take it one step further into the epistemological effects of AI—how do we truly know what we “know”? If AI can create art and fabricate news stories and videos, can we believe what we see anymore? Anything from images, voices, and video footage to phone scams can now be fabricated with startling realism. Every echelon of society is now affected by AI: journalism, elections, legal systems, financial markets, and ordinary interpersonal trust. This all begs the question, “How are we verifying anything anymore?”
Libraries stocked with physical books, access to peer-reviewed research, the willingness to fact-check our own biases, and face-to-face interactions with members of our communities are more important than ever. Human beings thrive in the physical world. The Gen Z maxim “touch grass” applies. That is, assuming the resources needed to keep growing grass in Utah are preserved by those who choose to use their voices and vote in local and national elections.
Assessing the full environmental effects of AI needs much more time and space than this article allows (and many journalists have covered it extensively). The news and debates around current proposals in Utah are harrowing. Because AI is often described as “digital,” this suggests a false immateriality, but its environmental effects are tangible. Training and operating large AI models requires significant computing infrastructure, electricity, water for cooling, and semiconductor manufacturing (read: data centers). Ultimately, individuals hold the power to make sure local leadership is accountable for reflecting the needs and values of their constituents. And Utahns do need and value our beautiful landscapes and protected natural resources.
When we step back and look at the long-term effects on our state and all its natural wonders, we need to ask ourselves if the easy, pretty face of AI is truly worth the cost when it turns and shows the other side. So much of the rhetoric has been that AI is “inevitable”, “it’s already happening”, and “you can’t stop it”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Voting is just one of many ways to get involved. Pay attention to how leadership is voting. Keep pushing back and inspecting both sides of every issue. Ask the hard questions. Join your local school board, support your child’s teacher, and get involved in their classroom, whenever possible. Sign petitions and get involved at a community level. Join a writing group, take an art class, or develop another physical skill. Support free resources like public libraries. Read, fact-check, and join discussions with real humans, even if the topic is challenging. It is uncomfortable to be vulnerable, but knowledge is power.
Get to know your neighbors. Bring them cookies or invite them to share a meal. It is more important than ever to participate in the community. After all, how do you know a real person wrote this article? That may be an incentive to get to know local writers on the lawn at the farmer’s market or join the writing group at the public library, which meets the second Saturday of every month. Whichever face of AI you choose to interact with, remember not to take everything you see at face value. Keep looking at it from both sides.
Join the Wasatch Back Writers 11:00 a.m. on the second Saturday of each month in the upstairs boardroom at the Wasatch County Library.
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