Surveys show that many Americans fear the worst about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools. But AI can also be helpful.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman speaks during the G20 Innovation Ministerial on Sept. 2 in Chapel Hill, N.C. His company’s release of ChatGPT in 2022 unleashed AI on the masses.

When it comes to the digital world, let’s just say that during the past 30 years I’ve experienced nonstop technical difficulties.

My technophobia originated back in the mid-1990s. As the general public gained access to the World Wide Web, I took my cue from the movie “WarGames,” a warning about how supercomputers could accidentally launch a thermonuclear apocalypse. Even as I sat in front of a computer all day for work, I avoided cyberspace entirely for fear of triggering World War III.

This same admittedly hyperbolic fear governed my initial response to artificial intelligence.

Article continues below this ad

When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it aroused my deepest dread. After all, I’d seen the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In that science-fiction classic, a computer named HAL 9000 developed a mind of its own during a space mission and tried to kill the astronauts onboard a ship, only to be deactivated and “die.”

I assumed that if I just pretended AI would go away, it eventually would, leaving all of us to live our lives in peace.

I should have known that my reluctance to keep pace with the world was........

© San Francisco Chronicle