Jayvier Chua, 16, is a student at Victoria Junior College and the founder of Youths for Humans, a youth group advocating against the unethical use of AI.
In this RICE Community Voices piece, he argues for a critical re-evaluation of AI’s implications for Singaporeans.
Top image: Zachary Tang / RICE file photo
I don’t hate Artificial Intelligence; I just want to know where the line is.
A friend of mine—a sweet, well-mannered gentleman—has a well-publicised reputation for using AI to automate the majority of his academic tasks. Per his habit, he used AI for a literature assignment, which forms a part of our yearly grade. He was eventually awarded full marks.
I remember how, barely a year ago, something like that would have been considered academic dishonesty. Marks would be deducted, scripts voided, and disciplinary action might have been taken. Today, as I see my teachers themselves joining the AI craze, I cannot help but feel a great sadness.
It was the trigger point for me to found Youths for Humans (YFH), a group of like-minded peers that aims to push back against the rampant, unquestioning embrace of AI. We were not meant to be rebels, just a group of young people with reservations.
It gives me great concern—not only the adoption of AI by fellow Singaporeans, but also the manner in which they have done so. Promising to make our lives easier, AI has trodden forward as a welcome disruptor on the national agenda. We’ve been told to prepare for the wave of AI-driven job losses and redesign our lives in accordance with the technology.
I find it difficult to fault Singaporeans. We are a pragmatic people living in possibly the world’s most expensive city. Between costly livelihoods and fading optimism, demanding that Singaporeans find the bandwidth to care about how generative AI trains itself on the works of human creators without consent or how it wrecks the environment might be a recipe for disappointment.
But Singaporeans, in all their compassion or indifference, must realise that this is a matter of self-preservation.
Digital Divinity
I formed YFH out of concern for the direction recent trends have led humanity towards.
As a collective of thinkers and, broadly speaking, creatives, we are all too aware that we are unlikely to change the world through writing essays, hosting events, or making Instagram infographics.
Nevertheless, we believe in the power of the public. We believe that in introducing our views to Singapore’s Overton window, we may rise above ourselves and influence public sentiment. Indirectly, we may influence the decisions of stakeholders far mightier than we are.
I must admit, AI is fascinating. Back in April, GPT-5.4 proved Erdős #1196, a famously unproven mathematical problem, in a single afternoon. AI accomplished what human mathematicians had never succeeded at for decades.
There is beauty in this. The more I learn about AI’s mechanisms, the more enamoured I grow with this machine—a machine designed by humans that seemingly keeps attempting to become human itself.
In the face of such wonders, I can understand the spiritual obsession many have with AI—a new god for a secular age.
I am also cognisant that grouping all forms of AI under one name flattens what different agents really do—a Gen AI chatbot serves a different purpose than a cancer-diagnosing model. Still, I am wary about how quickly we’ve come to incorporate AI into our daily lives.
Witnessing the state of the classroom, where AI has all but replaced the need for my peers to think, it is difficult to believe that the Erdős #1196-proving, hyper-intelligent machine of automated thought is generating subpar literature essays for teenage boys.
Later, those same boys will return home to scroll through algorithms dominated by AI bots and feeds pervaded by slop. My peers are being told that citing AI responses to prompts, conglomerations of non-cited sources, is academically valid. My elders are co-opted into thinking that they must embrace AI or risk being excluded from our progress.
A nation that’s exceedingly vulnerable to the whims of global forces needs to adapt to survive. That much is clear. But is that reasoning enough to justify supporting a technology that plagiarises human work and a narrative that presents this plagiarism as the key to Singapore’s future?
The Delusion Box
A layman Singaporean who is apathetic to matters like creative originality or intellectual theft might, at first glance, have no skin in the game. Such a Singaporean, however, might be compelled to rethink AI when jobs enter the equation.
As AI advances, the number of human faculties it can replace will naturally increase. Of course, this means the number of jobs that can be replaced will increase as well.
To suggest that AI is almost certain to lead to successive waves of mass layoffs and retrenchments is fairly uncontroversial. The first of these waves has already begun, and there is no indication that they are the last. As AI continuously advances in ability, it seems more than likely that the demand for human workers will progressively decrease.
The tech bro narrative is, of course, that AI will create jobs just as it replaces them. This narrative has its truth—OpenAI’s Applied AI Lab is expected to create more than 200 technical jobs in Singapore over the next few years. Salaries of AI roles here are rising fast. The government has allocated over S$1 billion for AI research.
As the AI sector grows, the industry’s profitability does too. Naturally, new jobs in the sector will arise. The question is, then, not whether AI will create new jobs (because it will). The question to consider is this: Will it create enough jobs to exceed or at least match the jobs it replaces?
No one really knows the limits of AI tech. If you were to pose the question to Silicon Valley’s AI proponents, they would claim that there are none. Anthropic’s CEO predicted that AI will become better than “almost all humans at almost everything”. Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, on the other hand, believes that superintelligent AI may emerge within the next decade.
Ironically, if AI is as capable as its creators say it is, we Singaporeans have much to worry about. By definition, the arrival of superintelligence would render the vast majority of jobs replaceable. That is unlikely to occur without government intervention, but the very replaceability of these previously non-replaceable jobs suggests that a great deal of AI-induced replacement is likely.
Some would argue that we would simply need to work in AI-related jobs. But even those jobs would be replaced as AI becomes capable of maintaining and developing itself better and at a lower cost than human programmers. AI is constantly getting better, and we should ask ourselves if there is truly any endpoint in sight.
If there is none, jobs won’t be the only thing that AI will replace. It could take the specific competence you built an identity around—the small daily proof that you’re needed for something only you can do. In the end, is this an existential conundrum for humanity?
For Humans
It is for these reasons that I started YFH. Again, I do not hate AI—I am simply cautious. We’re a small team of seven young people who want to present our views to the public, encouraging them to disagree with us and refute our concerns through civic discourse.
Because if Singaporeans never hear dissenting views, can they think critically about AI—or anything else they’re told to accept with open arms?
It may be that we are dead wrong on this matter and will eventually come around to AI. Perhaps in a decade, we will join the long list of theories disproved by Father Time.
But even so, we view our work as necessary. After all, we are the generation told to graduate and enter the workforce as AI natives. And if Singapore is putting all its chips on AI now, we’re just the ones who’ll have to live with how the bet lands.
