Listen, I’ve been doing technology things for…27 years? And here’s why I think artificial intelligence (AI), like most other tech fads I’ve seen in my lifetime, ain’t all that.
Sure, there are useful applications for the technology. And 99.99% of the applications out there are either actively predatory, passively harmful, gratuitous and mid, or all of the above. And they are all harming the environment and our health.
But wait, there’s more!
AI is pattern recognition. And the patterns it’s trained on are filled with bias! Bias harms people who are in the minority. According to a recent study out of Stanford:
“synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs …perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities.” - Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models (2024)
…and this includes code. When AI is trained on design patterns or code that is widely popular, but that also includes a lot of code that’s inaccessible or unusable, the resulting code is also inaccessible or unusable. We should also be extremely wary of any AI tool that claims it can refactor a codebase written in a language that most modern coders are not using.
Generative AI is being used to consolidate, analyze, and generate information in a way that can be used to surveil, prosecute, incarcerate, and kill people. When the richest dudes on the planet who own this tech are profiting from it, it’s at the expense of the rest of us.
People tend to believe algorithms more than each other as task complexity increases - but we also tend to view AI as human-like. We anthropomorphize AI tools by giving them human-like names and interact with them via chat prompts you (rather than, say, command prompts). This leads us to believe that we are in fact talking with another living being rather than a computer. It also leads some folks to think that AI will become sentient. (It won’t actually, but it will if humans believe that it is, which is worse.)
And by that, I mean that what it produces is functionally a middle-of-the-road, average, boring-ass, non-“edge case” output. This flattens our differences and creates a “norm” which actually does not exist. Individual people aren’t “normal”, but AI sure likes to tell us that’s a thing, and that really harms people who are far from that norm. Saying that everyone is the same also flies in the face of the fact that we are all weird as hell. It’s our differences that make us stronger, more creative, better.
Proponents of AI say that skeptics are “afraid” of AI or don’t understand it. Problem is, I do understand it! I know too much. I am not afraid of it so much as deeply frustrated by how folks are using it. Dismissing AI detractors as “fearful” allows proponents to dismiss valid critique outright rather than engage with it. It’s a strawman argument.
Charles Eames said, “Never delegate understanding.” Don’t rely on AI alone to make decisions about what’s true, certainly not for core parts of your work.
Understand the bias that ships with your LLM. Do everything you can to critically evaluate outputs for inaccessible, biased or otherwise harmful content.
Do something else. Turn off default settings that include AI. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and turn off AI features. Turn off Apple intelligence. Turn off Google Gemini. Take a harm-reduction approach to your tech use.
(FWIW, this is my approach to eating animal food products. I’m not vegan or even completely vegetarian, but I don’t build my food habits around animal products, which reduces how many animal products I consume.)
Individual choices get us down the road a piece, but what we really need is to mitigate its impacts at a high level, including regulation and environmental mitigation measures.
If someone critiques AI and it makes you uncomfortable, listen to understand and be open to changing your mind. Most of the folks who are warning about the harms of AI are minoritized people - Black and brown women, queer and trans people. Believe them!