CW: suicide mention
Over the last couple of years with the more recent discussion/discourse of AI, I’ve been noted as a bit of a hardliner in the anti-AI camp. I remain so – and feel I am often proven correct in that position – for exactly one reason: ethics.
I do not believe we are possessed of the kind of thoughtfulness, communal thinking, and empathy that would make AI safe or helpful to use. That’s the whole thing.
When I talked to our cohosts years about this, my first misgiving about this was about how many people would be fired or displaced in some way.
Years later, Jack Dorsey lays off 40% of his staff and says “This is the future and you need to embrace it.” We cover layoffs every single week. LinkedIn has so much slop on their platform, they outright move to ban it. Whole company databases are deleted in a moment of intense irony.
Meanwhile, people are having to deal with data centers poisoning their water. Particularly in majority black cities and towns. Electric companies, in service of these data centers, are informing their clients they will need to find new providers.
Ethics. Consideration of people.
What is this being used for? To wit, the most commonly seen cases are making movies, memes, music, commercials, and most importantly a society that continues to demand more while providing less as capitalism demands. However, there is something beyond that marketing.
Yes, marketing.
The idea of something going “based on something that you’ve said, here are some reasonable suggestions” goes back to T9 predictive text and spellcheck. Youtube video suggestions. Autocorrect.
Something has to observe what it is you do, process it, then store that information over time to be used later in some potentially helpful way. There are many genuinely helpful concepts here.
On the other side, being pushed by Big Tech and its marketing machine is the idea that you can use a somewhat advanced chatbot to do in moments what others spend years learning and practicing. That you can do as a novice what a person who deeply cares about their craft can do. That you can mimic imagination.
And so you see AI being used to make music, posters, “what if” scenarios for anime, memes.
But much like autocorrect and your youtube suggestions, to mimic imagination the machine must consume the product of imagination. Books, essays, music, paintings, digital art, tv shows, movies, and so on. In the interest of corporations (primarily), most of that consumption is done without the consent of those many people (with accompanying lawsuits). Most of which leads to a cycle of firing those people, realizing that Copilot or Claude or so many others can only do what it consumes, and then having to hire those people back while trying to pay them less.
Ethics.
Meanwhile, the machine is telling people to kill themselves. It is sending drones to murder people without properly identifying them. It is sending the police after people who haven’t done crimes. All of this is marketed as an inevitable “evolution” of technology by CEOs of companies that literally do not care whether you live or die and are settling lawsuits that absolve them of any responsibility to the damage they cause.
Again, ethics.
Can this tech be good? Can it be used for good? Of course it can, but I have to live in the context and reality of the world I am in and currently? I’m at war with that world and I am consigned to adopt a more extreme position than even I would like to have until that war is over. That means reckoning. That means consequence. That means a radical reimagining of how we use technology with a focus on serving people.
Until we can address that, what nuance is there to discuss in the public square? What upsides? What positives?
Can I discuss things in a more level-headed, moderate, well-considered way in the group chat? Maybe.
But in the public eye? I am morally compelled to be a hater. A hardliner.
I’ll take that.
