From the article: “In particular, five fundamental attributes of social media have harmed society. AI also has those attributes. Note that they are not intrinsically evil. They are all double-edged swords, with the potential to do either good or ill. The danger comes from who wields the sword, and in what direction it is swung. This has been true for social media, and it will similarly hold true for AI. In both cases, the solution lies in limits on the technology’s use.”
See, this is the exact shit I mean when I scaremonger about AI. Especially in this community, I have been called a few names and likened to some stupid anti-tech movements.
But it’s not the tech itself. It’s the world and the companies this tech is being borne into and giving power to. This is not the early 80s, where we generally had some sort of capitalist equilibrium going on—as much as an exploitative system can have equilibrium, that is. It’s a post-Reagan 2024, and this system is so out of balance that this is like, in a war between a modernized society and an uncontacted Amazon people, a nuke was dropped.
Your cars, your phones, your entire online ecosystem, all the smart devices, the cops, the federal govt…they’re all working in a system of surveillance and—honestly, for lack of a better word, though it’s been co-opted and bastardized by conspiracy nut jobs—mind control that we barely understand, let alone have any control over. But that’s exactly what this is, they are astroturfing public opinion, pushing ideas in an almost streamlined fashion, and getting us evermore addicted to these means of coercion.
And this is all before we even discuss the general balance of “consumer/producer.” Assuming we are even willing to make capitalism come close to functioning (which is a fools errand at this point), we need to completely upend the current imbalance in what we accept as a suitable give/take. They are taking more, while giving us less, and it’s only getting much worse. Now they’re taking way, way more than ever and we get, what, new social media sites in return? Nah. We are no longer consumers, we are products. We are the piece in the puzzle with the least agency.
And AI is only exacerbating those problems. And that’s all before we get into discussing the massive environmental concerns! We are barreling toward destruction and we are…sinking more computers and server farms and time and infrastructure to completely backwards energy consumers.
Don’t use their AI, refuse to use social media, jailbreak and privatize your phones, refuse to buy any surveillance nightmare cars, use a TOR browser…do everything we can to wrench just a little of our own data and agency back from them. Because getting all giddy over some shitty chatbot and refusing to heed the warnings of the Reddit and google CEOs literally spelling out how they are harvesting and profiling our data is just beyond stupid and gives them the idea that, as the google ceo said, “well, if you keep using it, it’s your own fault.” Or something to that effect. But at some point, these evil cartoon villains may just be right. We keep following along. At what point do we build parallel systems to evade their reach?
The problem is that fear mongering only serves them. Their plan is to stop individuals from having access to it, not companies and they will do so by convincing the population that AI is theft and therefore bringing up the price so only a handful of companies can afford to train models or by convincing the population that it’s too dangerous for the common man to have free access to it.
But individuals can use copyrighted artwork for their own personal use, businesses can’t. I don’t think there’s any attempt to get people to stop using it. As stated in the article (maybe not this one, but a recent one either way, I don’t remember at this point), AI chat bots are a GREAT way to extract obscene amounts of data from people. It’s one of the main draws to it for business, and one of its main uses for future profitability.
“Fear monger” might have been the wrong term to use, it’s got a negative connotation. But I do believe it’s a dangerous, dangerous step in the current trend of surveillance capitalism. Like I said, it’s akin to the A-bomb in the war over our privacy and data.