I Don’t Like Peer Pressure
I’m so tired of being told that if I don’t embrace AI I will be “left behind.“ I got over peer pressure when I was a teenager. I’m definitely not going to take it from corporations and tech bros who are destroying our planet and our society.
I don’t want to read an AI summary of an email when I could read the email itself. I don’t want to see a movie or TV show generated by AI when I know so many actors who are out of work. I don’t want to keep seeing AI used to replace art and critical thought and literal truths. I want an AI that can do my dishes for me. I want an AI that can clean the house so I have time to focus on other things. I want an AI that can function without doing irreparable harm to the environment and our brains.
AI actually does have the capacity for good.
AI could be improving accessibility, closing language barriers, and adding ease to our world. Instead, it’s making pornographic images of children, stealing the work of artists, and wasting so much clean water. On top of all of that, it’s known to be factually inaccurate and can’t even do simple math. The capacity for innovation and positive change are clouded by corporate greed. Instead of improving people’s lives, AI is replacing their jobs. Instead of helping people learn and grow, AI is teaching people not to think for themselves.
There are positive cases for AI that are unfortunately being overshadowed by the bad. Large Language Models can provide translation support and accessibility captioning for disabled people and people speaking different languages. I’ve considered building a chatbot that can help people practice using affirming pronouns. People could be taking mock job interviews, and getting feedback on how to do better. There are ways that this technology can improve our lives and make things easier. I know several disabled people who do rely on AI for some form of accessibility in their lives. But those LLMs were trained on stolen text and data. AI has been fueled by books, social media, and even the conversations we have with each other. But AI is only going to do as much as it’s creators will allow. AI is a product of it’s making, and perpetuates a lot of the problems and isms we face in the world.
The bubble is beginning to burst.
AI has become more and more expensive, and it’s now becoming more expensive for a company to invest in AI than to just hire the humans to do the labor. Because that is the reality of a system built on and for corporate greed. They will always push the limits for profit. AI is not the inevitable path forward for the future. It’s just the promise tech bros made to their investors because they ran out of different sizes and colors to release a phone in every year.
I hope for a future where the accessibility and positives of AI can be prioritized and the harms can be mitigated. I hope for a future where AI can replace chores instead of jobs. I hope for a future where AI can reverse damage we’ve done to our environment instead of accelerate it. I hope for a future that we’re likely never going to see.
But, I hope for a future.
Content Roundup
To beat the algorithm, The Maybe List ends each newsletter with round up of long-form content from the last week across Substack, YouTube, and Patreon.
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