musings.martyn.berlin
To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks.
I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.
I do not believe any positive outcome is possible with this form of AI that is worth the harms that it has already done and is continuing to do. Nor do I believe that “just one more model bro” will make something that is “intelligent”. Of course “AI” is a marketing term so it doesn't mean anything, neither does GenAI or the latest buzzword “Agentic”.
This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it.
A post was sent to me that really resonated. On the acceptance of GenAI
I am so tired of defending this stance that I am reaching the point of cutting entire communities out of my life because they will promote[1] AI usage.
People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
If you're not in this group with me, you see the adverts for it everywhere, from emails to TV to posters that have clearly been created with it and probably just roll your eyes or have a sensible chuckle about the rediculousness of it. For me it's actually stomach-turning to see people I respected endorsing or using it openly.
A theatre group I was with decided to take a picture of the group and make a “band poster” of us. Great, that's fun. Oh, they used ChatGPT and now I feel sick and they didn't even ask me.
A friend asked “siri” how long a medication is effective for and when it responded “would you like me to use chatGPT to find the answer” he just said “yes” as if he'd said yes a thousand times already, and just accepted the response as right. I don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now. Also I hope he doesn't die because he trusts some made-up stuff it tells him.
I walked out of a presentation the other day because they were somehow making a point of how bad AI is, by arguing with copilot live on stage. Great, so you acknowledge how bad it is by.... using it?!
Do you like using wikipedia? Cool, I work for one of the chapters behind the site. Guess what? People are using AI to get the information that was scraped from wikipedia and accepting it, “hallucinations” and all. Guess what none of those people do? Become editors, fix mistakes, keep the thing alive.
Worse still, AI is gaslighting you into believing it works. That's the whole point of a model that is designed to provide output that “seems reasonable”. Power users know to argue with it, whereupon it will “admit” that it was wrong, and pipe that to another AI ad infinitum to try and reduce the “made up” stuff. Regular people don't.
So yeah, I'm an outcast, and yeah, it sucks, I'm done with it, I can't take “a week off” from the _constant_ barrage of the stuff. Funny how if it were actually a technology for good, it wouldn't be advertised everywhere.
Yes, some people are forced to use it at work, they have my sympathy. Yes, some people need to use it because for one reason or another if they don't they won't survive. I do not judge you for that.
If you know all the harms (see the post linked to above) and use it “because it's convenient” in spite of all of that, damn right I'll judge you (mostly silently). I won't do more than attempt to provide you with the information of the harm it's doing and if you continue to use it after I've done that, avoid interacting with you.
If you know the harms and do something like “I can get a bonus for being the person who uses the most tokens so I'll just make an infinite loop between two AI agents” I will most likely really dislike you for putting your self-gain over the impact and cut you out of my life.
If you push people to use it however subtly (e.g. “You should just use copilot for that, it's really so much easier”), I will avoid you at all costs. If the place you're posting such to doesn't have rules against that, I'll probably leave that place. I might try to encourage that kind of rule, I might just vanish (depending on the group dynamics).
Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe? I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Does it mean I loose friends and influence and have a good cry now and then as I close chapters of my life because people don't have the same moral structure as me? Definitely.
[1] As in “You should rub some AI on that”, “Claude is great for that”, “no apps are good for this situation, use AI to make your own” or similar. Not “Hey, Claude is cheap right now, go buy some tokens!”. This usage of promote is not common in the US it seems.
