AI and the Erosion of Practice

If we look at the situation with AI through the framework of MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), where the main concepts can be explained simply as follows:

• Practice - any complex and organized activity that people do together for the sake of the activity itself, not just for quick personal gain. Examples include chess, football, physics, painting, and music. A practice is different from basic skills such as laying bricks or digging holes.
• External goods - things such as money, power, and prestige that can be gained through participation in a practice. These goods are limited and competitive, so gaining more of them often means someone else gets less.
• Internal goods - things such as mastery, understanding, and beauty that can only be achieved through participation in a practice and are part of the practice itself. They can usually be fully recognized only by people who take part in that practice. Their achievement also benefits society more broadly. For example, no amount of money can buy the ability to play the violin beautifully or to deeply understand quantum physics.
• Institution - doctors need hospitals, scientists need laboratories, and both need equipment, salaries, and organization. Practices and institutions cannot exist without each other, but there is always a tension between them. When an institution starts focusing mainly on profit, rankings, status, or other external goods, it can "corrupt" the practice.

Once these concepts are defined, we can ask the following question:

Will the use of artificial intelligence, and its ability to reproduce the results of practices - mainly in the interests of institutions and for the pursuit of external goods - lead to the erosion of the practices themselves? How will it be possible in the future to continue and develop a practice, and to achieve excellence within it, if fewer and fewer people are able to recognize and value its internal goods, or are willing to spend the time and effort needed to achieve them? Could this eventually lead to the erosion of the institutions themselves?

Is today’s LLM a participant in a practice, and can it achieve excellence?

Clearly not on its own, without a human. Current systems do not have a practical biography of their own. They do not become members of a community, accept its standards as binding, develop virtues, experience internal goods, or pursue those goods for their own sake. They simply optimize their outputs within a given system of training and interaction. Their ability to produce these outputs is based on the accumulated results of practices carried out by many generations of human beings.