The inhuman Use of AI

 Some people are early adopters of new gadgets and new technologies.  You have probably met some of these people, or maybe you know them.  They are the people who bought cell phones when they were large and stored in bags.  They probably had the first color television set, the first stereo record player on the block, whatever the new thing was, they were among the first to have it.  Back in college, the early adopters adopted Texas Instruments calculators.  We had been using slide rules to calculate complex quantities since Napier discovered logarithms.  I stuck with the slide rule for a while, until I found I couldn't keep up with students with calculators.  But instead of getting a Texas Instruments calculator, I bought a Hewlett Packard Scientific calculator, which was even faster.

If if you, like me, wait to buy the new thing until you determine a need for it, the early adopters have probably called you a luddite.  So, I was interested to read an article in The Atlantic by Brian Merchant entitled The New Luddites Aren't Backing Down. In this case, the people calling others "luddites" are the early adopters of artificial intelligence (AI).

When Molly Crabapple touched down in Italy last year for the International Journalism Festival, she expected the usual. The annual conference bills itself as Europe’s largest media event, and Crabapple had planned to give a talk about her career as an artist and writer reporting from the front lines of conflict zones. But as she took in some of the panels, she felt herself growing uneasy.

Sprinkled among the journalists discussing topics such as the war in Ukraine and the state of podcasting, some of the speakers were promoting the use of generative AI. She overheard someone say that journalists write too much, that much of their work could be automated. “I was like, this is disgusting,” she told me. “Why isn’t anyone going to challenge this?” When it came time for her own panel, she decided to do just that, saying onstage, “The use of generative AI is not only going to destroy my industry—it is going to destroy all of yours, if you’re anyone who creates anything … If you’re anyone here who creates, it is in your interest to fight these generative-AI platforms.”

Crabapple then released an open letter with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, calling on publishers to ban generative AI from replacing human art and writing in their operations. Nearly 4,000 signatories added their name over the course of the year, including the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, the author Naomi Klein, and the actor John Cusack. But though Crabapple has found her supporters, she noted a particular kind of backlash as well: “Anyone who is critical of the tech industry always has someone yell at them ‘Luddite! Luddite!’ and I was no exception,” she told me. It was meant as an insult, but Crabapple embraced the term. Like many others, she came to self-identify as part of a new generation of Luddites. “Tech is not supposed to be a master tool to colonize every aspect of our being. We need to reevaluate how it serves us.”

What a concept, that the technology should serve us rather than we serving it. The use of AI to replace actual writers is incredibly dangerous. It has the potential to concentrate in even fewer hands the official narrative. It is bad enough now with so many in the mainstream press essentially being scribes for the administration. But there are still independent journalists who look at all relevant facts and offer counter narratives that give us a better understanding of the issues.

But it is not just that it places the information you and I get into a few powerful hands. The act of going out and finding and interviewing sources, of sifting through those sources, evaluting the relative weight of credibility, and of making sense out of chaos is a fundamentally human act, one which no machine should be doing, even if it could.

In our many conversations, those who view themselves as new Luddites made clear to me that they do not want to reject the many technologies that have improved our lives, or send anyone back to the Stone Age. They know that above all, the first Luddites wanted a seat at the table, a say in how technologies were used to facilitate activities foundational to the human experience, such as work. If they had shared in the gains instead of being left to starve, if they had been given agency over their technological destinies, they would not have taken up their hammers.

Work intrinsically gives meaning to life. But Klaus Schwab and the sycophants of the World Economic Forum believe that in the future most work will be done by machines, so fewer people will be "needed." Thus, they posit that billions of us must be "eliminated" as useless eaters. Oh, and they are pretty sure we won't need elections either. Wonder where they got that notion? But the world really needs all of us, working for each other. You never know from where the next big idea will come, after all.  Electrical lines will always need repairs, for instance. And robots cannot build or repair roads. Or will the billionaire WEFers build and repair their own water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators?  Can they build and repair their own aircraft?

But there is more to life than Schwab dreams, of course. There is art in all its forms, whether music, or painting, or sculpture, or writing great literature. AI may be able to mimic art, but it will never create it, because it is, at heart, a machine. It is not, and never will be human. Perhaps a philistine like Schwab doesn't understand human culture, but if he gets his way, he will find it a very poor world indeed.