I’ll admit that I’m of the no-AI camp for two reasons: the use of resources and what I’ve read about effect on the immediate communities surrounding the big data centers and that I personally have always felt comfortable writing and brainstorming and so don’t see a need for AI. I get so tired of business workshops and friends frequently saying, “Just throw it into AI,” any time they’re talking about “productivity” or producing creative content. I have acquaintances use it for daily recipes and I think, I have 10 cookbooks and tons on recipes saved in my google drive that are just as easy to access. Or someone will use to think of a title or talking points for a blog and the two times I’ve tried that, it came up with ideas I had already thought of. So I continue to resist using it.
But you bring up good points. I also spend time on my phone reading Substack. And I am often guilty of binge-watching Netflix. Is the use of those technologies having the same climate effect? It’s definitely not something I’ve heard anyone talk about. But then, very few people I know or follow are talking about the climate effect of AI either, so perhaps it’s just the company I keep.
I do appreciate the way you are showing your use of AI and I can see the value in those chats. I wonder how many people are engaging with it as you are, in a thoughtful and disciplined way.
Thanks for sharing this - it’s definitely making me think!
Appreciate the perspective! I also agree that people lean on it too readily, and that in many cases what it produces is very shallow and the “art” in particular has started overcrowding the digital landscape, it’s so icky. I also worry what it does to our critical thinking skills (which collectively we’re already suspect) if we lean on it more and more to take on creative tasks, like a title etc.
I’m still even a bit suspect of my use of it. However, the cat seems to be out of the bag. And it will become a collective resource issue just like greenhouse gasses. On the individual level, there may be some personal benefits to say switching to a car-free lifestyle (or an ai-free lifestyle) but making those individual choices won’t change the infrastructure that still makes cars dominant and widely used.
We are in a predicament. And it seems like we will have to collectively find ways to regulate its harms.
Interesting to look at this conversation in light of recent articles (Vox just had one today!) about ChatGPT's tendency toward flattery and sycophancy—it seems very much in evidence in these conversations!
Absolutely! I explored this a bit in my first post of this kind. If you don’t bring a meta awareness to it - the flattery might compel people to be completely uncritical of their own perspective. Feel like it can devolve into a dangerous positive feedback loop.
I definitely think the most cogent argument against AI is its accessing and often reproduction of unlicensed work and I would support any regulations to curtail that. I also think, all learning, like the learning human brains do, is plagiarism with extra steps. In order to become a better writer, I train my skill by reading good writers and then I try to reproduce that quality with my own perspective. I’m plagiarizing the structures of quality and then applying it to subjects in my purview. Which is not too different than how Ai works.
LLMs are modeled to learn like a human brain, they just have better memory and larger hard drives.
The question becomes - how do we acknowledge and solve for its material and social harms, like we would Amazon, or Apple, or any industrial giant. The power of Ai is real, the structures of its implementation—like 99% of companies we rely on and participate with today—exist within harmful capitalistic structures.
I think my main point is, we’re making the same mistake we made with climate. We’re trying to shame people into being perfect consumers when what we should focus on is structural regulation.
Like cryptocurrency before it, AI has become the ~bad~ technology to pat yourself on the back for not using. This strikes me as a little too convenient. Basing our society on the internet -- with all the electricity and water usage that involves -- is a more fundamental issue than AI.
I’ll admit that I’m of the no-AI camp for two reasons: the use of resources and what I’ve read about effect on the immediate communities surrounding the big data centers and that I personally have always felt comfortable writing and brainstorming and so don’t see a need for AI. I get so tired of business workshops and friends frequently saying, “Just throw it into AI,” any time they’re talking about “productivity” or producing creative content. I have acquaintances use it for daily recipes and I think, I have 10 cookbooks and tons on recipes saved in my google drive that are just as easy to access. Or someone will use to think of a title or talking points for a blog and the two times I’ve tried that, it came up with ideas I had already thought of. So I continue to resist using it.
But you bring up good points. I also spend time on my phone reading Substack. And I am often guilty of binge-watching Netflix. Is the use of those technologies having the same climate effect? It’s definitely not something I’ve heard anyone talk about. But then, very few people I know or follow are talking about the climate effect of AI either, so perhaps it’s just the company I keep.
I do appreciate the way you are showing your use of AI and I can see the value in those chats. I wonder how many people are engaging with it as you are, in a thoughtful and disciplined way.
Thanks for sharing this - it’s definitely making me think!
Appreciate the perspective! I also agree that people lean on it too readily, and that in many cases what it produces is very shallow and the “art” in particular has started overcrowding the digital landscape, it’s so icky. I also worry what it does to our critical thinking skills (which collectively we’re already suspect) if we lean on it more and more to take on creative tasks, like a title etc.
I’m still even a bit suspect of my use of it. However, the cat seems to be out of the bag. And it will become a collective resource issue just like greenhouse gasses. On the individual level, there may be some personal benefits to say switching to a car-free lifestyle (or an ai-free lifestyle) but making those individual choices won’t change the infrastructure that still makes cars dominant and widely used.
We are in a predicament. And it seems like we will have to collectively find ways to regulate its harms.
Interesting to look at this conversation in light of recent articles (Vox just had one today!) about ChatGPT's tendency toward flattery and sycophancy—it seems very much in evidence in these conversations!
Absolutely! I explored this a bit in my first post of this kind. If you don’t bring a meta awareness to it - the flattery might compel people to be completely uncritical of their own perspective. Feel like it can devolve into a dangerous positive feedback loop.
AI is just plagiarism with extra steps.
I definitely think the most cogent argument against AI is its accessing and often reproduction of unlicensed work and I would support any regulations to curtail that. I also think, all learning, like the learning human brains do, is plagiarism with extra steps. In order to become a better writer, I train my skill by reading good writers and then I try to reproduce that quality with my own perspective. I’m plagiarizing the structures of quality and then applying it to subjects in my purview. Which is not too different than how Ai works.
LLMs are modeled to learn like a human brain, they just have better memory and larger hard drives.
The question becomes - how do we acknowledge and solve for its material and social harms, like we would Amazon, or Apple, or any industrial giant. The power of Ai is real, the structures of its implementation—like 99% of companies we rely on and participate with today—exist within harmful capitalistic structures.
I think my main point is, we’re making the same mistake we made with climate. We’re trying to shame people into being perfect consumers when what we should focus on is structural regulation.
Like cryptocurrency before it, AI has become the ~bad~ technology to pat yourself on the back for not using. This strikes me as a little too convenient. Basing our society on the internet -- with all the electricity and water usage that involves -- is a more fundamental issue than AI.