Are Pakistanis afraid of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) more than any other nation? Are we afraid because we are a conservative community? Do we need to stay afraid of the enchantment and unprecedented rise of generative AI chatbots such as Gemini, Chat GPT, and DeepSeek (which is setting the world abuzz at the moment)? Whether we are afraid or not, what should we do about AI as individuals, professionals, academics, and most importantly as humans? These are the points that I intend to ponder over in this essay.
Generative AI is defined as a "type of AI that creates new content by learning from existing data" and emulates human interactive patterns. After keenly observing many friends colleagues and students, I have reached the conclusion that yes, we in Pakistan are afraid of the rise of Artificial Intelligence and I think part of the credit behind this technophobia goes to Hollywood franchises such as The Matrix and Terminator and a recent Netflix movie M3GAN (2022). Technology going evil and threatening the existence of humans has been a recurrent trope of Science Fiction and media productions from the Euro-American part of the world. So, yes, we are afraid because we have been conditioned to feel so. Moreover, being Pakistanis we have always been paranoid about the imperial powers invading our geographical, and psycho-social, and now the cyberspaces and Chat GPT seem like the apex of a mega surveillance and techno-colonial panoptic structure which keeps an eye on us all the time.
Chat GPT is one of the many available Generative AI tools that use artificial intelligence to generate human-like responses. It took the world by storm but it was not the first AI app that we came across it just shook us because of its sophistication, accessibility, and efficiency in performing our everyday tasks. Alexa, Siri, Google Maps, Spotify, Netflix, and Social Media Apps have all been using AI to generate suggestions for reading and shopping based on our search histories. So, AI was already there but generative AI’s promise to transform our personal, professional, and academic spheres has definitely become more pervasive, real, inevitable, and hard to ignore.
According to a survey conducted by Forbes Advisor, 77% of Americans are concerned that AI will cause job losses and 80 % have expressed concerns over the possible danger to their data privacy
I remember that I came to know about the existence of Chat GPT when I found a very good assignment submitted by one of my students whom I believed could not write that well. I checked its plagiarism on Turnitin but ‘nada’ and I was flabbergasted how come this assignment is so on-spot when I know for a fact that this certain student does not have the kind of English writing skills that have been demonstrated in this submission. When I came to know about Chat GPT and its potential, I hated it and my first concern was that it would be another added problem to the long list of issues that we have to face as teachers. Gradually, I started attending training on AI usage, reading about it, and experimenting with it. It dawned on me that just like any other technology that was loathed in the past (starting from the printing press in the Guttenberg which initiated Europe into the age of Renaissance to smartphones which later proved to be a boon for our academic, and professional, and personal lives) we just need to learn to navigate and harness the unlimited and unfathomable potential of this latest installment in the long list of technologies which changed the course of human evolution.
I think it is also important to ponder over whether Pakistanis are the only nation that is afraid of technology. Are we afraid because we are backward, conservative, illiterate, and belong to the Third World? The answer is a big blatant NO. We are not the only nation that is afraid of it. According to a survey conducted by Forbes Advisor, 77% of Americans are concerned that AI will cause job losses and 80 % have expressed concerns over the possible danger to their data privacy.
Another poll conducted by YouGov found that almost 50% of Americans believe that AI will attack humanity. I’ll again give the credit of this widespread technophobia to media productions. Being afraid of the onslaught of technology is nothing new. The Luddite movement of the 19th century, in which textile workers raided and destroyed the machines that threatened their job prospects, is one of the many examples from the history of human beings being hostile toward the rise of machines. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) are also cautionary tales about how over-reliance on science can debilitate the state of ‘being human’ and human affairs. Dan Brown’s novel Origin (2017) is the latest addition to the long history of the discourse which goes rogue and berserk. Our part of the world has also shared this common fear of technology. Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi’s short story “Thal” narrates the tale of a rural community that is afraid of the invasion of their physical, psychological, cultural, and moral by the laying down of train tracks on their land and introduction of the train by their colonial masters. Characters in the story believe that the train heralds the arrival of Dajjal and the End of Times. The story highlights that the arrival of the train in South Asia heralds a new era that would lack basic human ethics and morality characteristic of simple rural communal lives. Satyajit Ray’s short story “Anukul” also expresses the fearsome potential of machines and technology to commit malevolent acts. Thus, fear of any new technology is normal and universal in human societies.
Be it the East or the West, we humans are afraid of technology. The West has its own onto-epistemological bases for these fears but in our part of the world, we have an added reason to be afraid of cyber-colonisation which has its roots emanating from our past experience with colonisation. Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School, enlists five reasons why people resist AI in the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review (January- February 2025). He enumerates that people refuse to use AI because they are afraid of its opaqueness, lack of human emotions, inflexibility, autonomy, and inhuman interactive structure. The fear of the unknown and incomprehensible has been inherent in the human psyche by default. If people are made to understand what AI is and how it works that will help people in accepting it. People are also uncomfortable with AI’s emotionless technology so anthropomorphising it might be helpful in this regard. AI seems to be inflexible so add-ons related to adaption and flexibility in AI programs might be a way to tackle this. The issue of AI's overwhelming autonomy can be sorted out by using ‘human-in-the-loop’ techniques to reassure human agency in the AI-human interaction.
If used in excess and untactfully, generative AI is definitely a threat to human reasoning, logic, and critical thinking skills
Global Intelligentsia and academicians also believe that humans are better writers than generative AI and that humans can do better than AI at writing. They also believe that it fabricates facts and has mediocre performance in academic queries. Nevertheless, a rise in the courses and trainings offered on the use of generative AI underscores the fact that it is important to exploit the potential of technology and harness it to keep pace and tackling the challenges posed to human agency in the wake of AI.
In Pakistan, the first hurdle in promoting the use of AI is our digital illiteracy. A 2023 policy paper issued by the German Institute of Global and Area Studies has validated that the Global South is neither well-aware nor trained for the beneficial and skillful use of generative AI technology which poses the risk of further the global skill gap and garnering new forms of inequalities amongst the privileged and underprivileged communities.
To be honest, I am personally apprehensive about the detrimental effects of generative AI on students’ language skills (can’t totally shake it off because of my background in ELT and exposure to enormous amounts of Science Fiction). I also dread the probable elimination of the skill of writing by hand as it is already a dwindling and vanishing tradition in the wake of the increasing trend of paper-free communications and document submissions. In this post-ChatGPT era, this time when I taught George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), we couldn’t easily dismiss the passages where it was mentioned that in this dystopian world created by Orwell, individuals are not allowed to write and record anything in their handwriting. As a result, when the protagonist Winston Smith tries to rebel against the system and write his own diary, he writes like a child (small sentences in uneven handwriting) and is incapable of producing complex sentences and incorporating sophisticated vocabulary in his writing because of the lack of practice with handwriting. I am mortally afraid that there might be a future AI generation of students whose writing skills might come down to this level of inefficacy.
With the recent launch of Chinese AI, DeepSeek, the generative AI has entered into a viciously competitive political arena where the supremacy of the Euro-American AI systems has been challenged
If used in excess and untactfully, generative AI is definitely a threat to human reasoning, logic, and critical thinking skills. Once human beings stop writing and asking generative AI to think and write for them they will be out of practice with the use of their mental faculties, linguistic abilities, and logic, reasoning, critical thinking and gradually all their human skills will become rusty and more like vegetables and machine freak zombies. The non-western language activists are also concerned that generative AI will further cement the supremacy of the English language and pace up the extinction and exclusion of regional and endangered languages which underscores the need to incorporate regional and endangered languages into AI chatbots.
With the recent launch of Chinese AI, DeepSeek, the generative AI has entered into a viciously competitive political arena where the supremacy of the Euro-American AI systems has been challenged. A basic discourse analysis of the negative connotations of the words (used for DeepSeek) such as “spooky” by BBC’s Business and Technology reporters Peter Hoskins and Imran Rahman-Jones and BBC’s Technology Editor Zoe Kleinman’s verdict that it is "too chatty" and contingent to china’s censorship policy in comparison to ChatGPT are fragile efforts to undermine the potential of DeepSeek and save the sinking ship of Euro-American AI hegemony.
In order to keep this debate local, I would like to end this piece by giving a reference to another short story “Tractor” by Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. It narrates how the arrival of tractor technology in the agricultural lands of the Subcontinent took away farmers' jobs but the same farmers who lost their jobs to tractors learned about its technology and became tractor mechanics and found a way out of the onslaught of technology on their jobs. I think Qasmi’s story resonates with our times and provides a blueprint we should deal with the onslaught of generative AI into our domestic, professional, and academic spheres.
Whether we accept or not we are deeply embroiled in this rapidly changing world which is swarmed by AI and we have been pushed into this technologically stricken world whether we like it or not. So, what should we do? Should we remain afraid of technology, stay digitally illiterate, and continue to shun and hide away from this technology? I fear that is not the way to go. The multidimensional human apprehensions related to AI, by any chance, remain valid and real. However, we need to learn about AI, we need to train ourselves and the next generation for an efficient, proficient, professional, and pragmatic use of AI for augmenting and supplementing human reasoning, linguistic abilities, and critical thinking skills rather than replacing human spaces.
We do not only need to tap into the potential of AI for generating innovative ideas for businesses, agriculture, medicine, engineering, and traffic planning, but also tackle our local issues characteristic to only our part of the world: poverty, hunger, illiteracy, extremism, inflation, and many more. Moreover, we need to invest in this sector by educating and training our youth to face this challenge and being a part of this AI revolution by adding their own regional languages and local wisdom into it. We need to hone our skills and struggle to keep up with the pace of the global trends of AI usage. Perhaps we need to start from universities and the education sector to train teachers to further train their students but that is a story for another time. I'll come back to it later at another time.
My two cents after all this discussion are:
“Thou human spirit,
Do not be afraid as technology cannot replace your essence
But beware and prepare for the battles to come”.
While I was thinking about editing the lines written above I thought of augmenting their poetic style with AI. So, I gave Chat GPT this prompt “You are writing a column for a newspaper, rewrite the following text into a warning haiku like the ones spoken by Yoda in Star Wars, it should also retain its Shakespearean and biblical undertones."Thou human spirit, Do not be afraid as technology cannot replace your essence but beware and prepare for the battles to come". And Chat GPT produced this Haiku:
Oh, the spirit of man,
Fear not, thy essence stays whole—
But steel for the strife.
I gave the same prompt to DeepSeek and it generated this Haiku:
Fear not, mortal flame,
Machines rise, yet soul stands firm—
Prepare, battles loom.
Now I leave it to the audience which haiku they like more.
By the way, ChatGPT produced this image specifically for the Pakistani audience to express this haiku visually:
However, DeepSeek is yet unable to generate an image version of it but the idea for generating an image related to it provided by this chatbot was surprisingly close enough which has been produced verbatim below:
“A glowing, ethereal human figure stands tall, surrounded by swirling shadows of advancing technology—gears, circuits, and digital streams. Above, a storm brews, lightning crackling, symbolising the "battles to come." The figure's heart radiates a warm, golden light, untouched by the encroaching darkness, embodying the "human spirit." The scene is framed by ancient, weathered stone arches, evoking a Shakespearean or biblical tone, with faint inscriptions in an archaic script”