If there’s one thing a Ngāpuhi likes, it’s arguing a case. Unfortunately for everyone else, I’ve always got one.
Artificial intelligence is having a phenomenal year. Apparently, it can write your assignment, draft a CV, answer difficult emails, and plan your holiday all before breakfast. At this rate, the only thing it can’t seem to do is explain why everyone is pretending this isn’t the biggest political shift of the decade.
What began as a novelty chatbot has become an inescapable software embedded into our phones, camouflaged within search engines and social media feeds until it stopped feeling like software altogether. Choosing to opt out now feels less like a preference and more like a political statement, and somewhere along the way, AI has just become an expected part of the furniture. More than that, it introduced itself as one of those things you’re expected to embrace before you’ve had any time to decide how you feel about it all. Fortunately, ChatGPT is more than happy to form your opinion for you.
What’s Free Costs More
What’s most impressive about artificial intelligence isn’t its capability of writing an essay or answering a question – it’s how quickly it convinced us that uncertainty was an inconvenience to eliminate, rather than a space to think. Before the rise of AI, there was a time when not knowing something meant opening another book, asking another person, or sitting with the all-consuming discomfort of not having an immediate answer. We used to Google a question, filter through searches, skim Wikipedia, disappear down a Reddit rabbit hole, and slowly piece together an answer. The process was clumsy, occasionally frustrating and long – but it was organic and it belonged to us. Now, uncertainty lasts about as long as it takes to open another tab and skim through an AI-generated summary.
Perhaps that is exactly why AI feels so irresistible. It promises not just speed, but relief – soothing a case of writer’s block, guiding the way through awkward emails, and carving a path through the messy process of thinking through an idea before arriving at a conclusion. But where exactly do we draw the line in consulting the model before consulting ourselves?
The Corporate Handshake
Of course, none of this is actually free, either. It never is. Nothing requiring billions of dollars in chips, colossal data centres and enough electricity to power entire cities accidentally becomes free; as though the world’s largest technology companies suddenly discovered philanthropy overnight. Every announcement arrives gift-wrapped in the same four words: innovation, productivity, investment, jobs and growth. It’s almost comical how billion-dollar infrastructure projects always arrive with vocabulary too positive to interrogate.
It’s not as though the most successful companies ever really sold one product. They have long understood that the easiest sale is the one that makes every alternative feel irrational. Fast-food chains sell meal deals for a reasonable price to make ordering separately feel wasteful at your own expense. Phone companies bundle unlimited data, and electricity providers bundle wifi. Likewise, one could say that artificial intelligence is simply bundling judgement, because the goal was never to make life easier, but to make dependence feel sensible.
Shortcut to Authority
Nothing is more unsettling than when artificial intelligence begins masquerading as expertise. Across every industry, AI-generated work is becoming incredibly difficult to distinguish from work produced by trained professionals, and Māori spaces aren’t exempt from that shift. If anything, they are especially vulnerable because te reo Māori, tikanga and whakapapa carry enormous cultural value, while much of the information itself remains publicly accessible through trusted organisations and public records.
People beginning their journey with organisations like Māori Land Court to access whānau records are increasingly confronted by people willing to package freely available information into polished AI-generated products and charge communities for receiving their own information back with better formatting. There is something deeply uncomfortable about charging families for public resources that have simply been repackaged by a chatbot. While using AI as a tool is one thing, quietly selling machine-generated cultural labour as though it were hard-earned expertise is another entirely.
Saving Time, For What?
Every generation has been promised that technology will save time. Washing machines, emails, smartphones and now artificial intelligence have all arrived with the same sales pitch: less work, more life. It’s a little like the plot of the Bee Movie. The bees finally free themselves from work, only to discover they’d accidentally outsourced the one thing keeping the entire ecosystem alive. We keep celebrating every task AI removes from our day without asking whether some of those tasks were quietly holding our own intellectual ecosystem together. But if we look around, somehow, we have never seemed busier. We answer more emails, attend more meetings, generate more content and produce more work, all of which we were told the technology was going to replace. If AI is buying us back our time, it’s worth asking who keeps spending it.
Long Live the Question
