Editor's Note

“What hath God wrought?” asked Samuel F.B. Morse in the first successful telegraph message sent on May 24, 1844. Nearly two hundred years later, the world seems to be faced with a similar query. What hath God (or perhaps, Sam Altman) wrought this time? Mainstream media has spent the past year shoving two topics down our throats: Donald J. Trump and artificial intelligence. Last semester, our predecessors took on the first, rallying the troops to put together a brilliant Trump issue that tackled the ways the 47th President of the United States has impacted Harvard and Cambridge throughout his tenuous time in office. We’ve decided to take on the second. In doing so, we have wondered if we are simply adding to the noise of an already over-saturated news cycle. As WIRED editor Katie Drummond quips, the “worst thing about AI is that people can’t shut up about it.” Technology has inspired euphoria and despair — and most of all, RACKET — since before that first telegraph message. All the while, we humans (putting aside the catastrophic environmental impacts of our continued “progress”), have remained mostly fine. But among the pile-up of articles and think pieces, another, louder racket looms. Ads for chatbots seep into every sphere of daily life. Search engines preempt man-made results with AI overviews and no way to opt out. Professors ask us to turn to ChatGPT for math tutoring, book summaries, and essay edits. Billionaires continue to build data centers on top of small towns, whether they vote for them or not. As journalists, Harvard students, and creatives, we believe we have an obligation to investigate this phenomenon. Stories about AI are stories about our futures — futures we’re unwilling to arrive at by accident. Because likely, the worst thing about AI is not that people are talking about it, but what happens when the conversations stop. Just as Morse mistook his invention for divine intervention, we may similarly come to assume that this new technology is both natural and inevitable. But these inventions are not God, they are human. And thus, they are fallible. In this issue, writers demonstrate how AI is perceived through many different eyes: in one story, it’s the key to solving scientific problems that have stumped centuries of researchers, and in the next, it’s the coming of the antichrist. Yet every single article — the result of face-to-face interviews, pen-to-paper efforts, and arduous editing sessions — marks a commitment to thought. To sifting through the noise enough to question the world around us. They are a plea for you to do the same. AJBS + KJK