Humanity

When I left the hall after my last exam, I was, as usual, rather frustrated about a pile of ‘could have done betters’. But it was a sunny April day and it did not take long before I saw a small group of little fluffy ducklings crossing the zebra crossing. A car stopped at a respectful distance from them to let them cross. Nobody can stay angry if baby birdies cross the street.

Apart from being duckling season, it is also graduation season for my fellow students in the Aerospace Engineering bachelor. They got to hear their graduation subjects today, just as I did last year. From today, for 10 long weeks, five days a week, eight hours a day, they will sit at a table in the Fellowship building to work on the Design Synthesis Exercise (DSE), their last design exercise. Ten intense weeks of long days and systems engineering and trying to do things that will ultimately not work. Ten weeks of memes and latecomer cakes and sending letters to other teams. Ten weeks of learning, an exercise in designing a complex product and with teamwork that I wish for every TU Delft student.

After the final symposium last year with the presentations of our DSEs, our team was not yet done. At the suggestion of our supervisor, the publication process of our idea started. After a lot of emails and evening sessions at ‘our’ old table, we finally got good news on this sunny day: our article was accepted for publication.

Ten students and 10 x 40 hours reduced to an AI article

In the group chat the next day were three links to popular scientific articles about our project. One of them, presumably written by AI, and one that was not ashamed of admitting that the ‘author’ was an LLM. It just about broke my heart. Ten students, 10 x 40 hours, and a lot of hours by our supervisor to make this all possible. Reduced to an AI article, without added value in relation to our original article, that was also online. I would have preferred it if someone – a human – had written a critical article packed with ‘could have been betters’ than whatever this was.

The DSE is a perfect example of humanity. The subjects that emerge from it are the result of trial and error and brainstorms, and mostly of cooperation between 10 people who did not know each other before. Another example of humanity is sending four people and some cameras to the moon on a test and observation mission. People see things in a way that robots cannot imitate, and people are not completely rational.

To my mind, an LLM will never be a writer. An LLM ‘author’ completely misses the point in terms of writing, describing, defining, taking notes etc. It’s absolutely not about a perfect end product. It’s about the journey there, the reason why, about creativity and emotions, and about your underlying intentions that always influence how you express something. This is what makes us human. Despite its amazing potential, AI is still a machine. A water gulping, energy gobbling machine. But that aside. Let us not hand over our creativity to a machine. What does a machine know about creative writing? It has never seen a family of ducklings crossing the road.