The AI Generated Emperor's New Clothes

That will destroy us all

Generative AI is useless, not profitable, horrible for the planet, and dangerous for our critical thinking skills. So why is it getting tons of funding and justifying massive layoffs and industry shake ups? The really simple answer is that tech bros and billionaires are really not smart but also very short sighted and self interested.

An MIT study suggests ChatGPT is actually eroding our critical thinking skills. This actually might be useful if you’re trying to usher in fascism and destroy academia and journalism. Generative AI needs massive energy which requires data centers which require water to keep them cool. Some estimates suggest asking ChatGPT a question uses ten times the energy a normal google search does and produce more carbon emissions. Unfortunately we don’t have the clearest picture of the environmental fall out because AI companies aren’t exactly transparent. And if that isn’t all infuriating enough these tools don’t even work! They hallucinate and can’t do what companies claim they can. And, again, they aren’t even making their investors money.

We can all speculate about why generative AI is taking over when its so useless and awful but I think its because if it did work it would validate the world views of those who are funding it. They want to believe critical thinking and humanities skill sets are useless. They want to believe automation is coming and workers wont be needed. And they want to believe that their skillset is actually the most beneficial to society to justify their billions.

Additionally, generative AI serves a lot of oppressive worldviews. People want to pretend that algorithms can’t be racist or sexist and so when they of course are racist there’s plausible deniability. Or even worse the racism is justified because a “neutral” algorithm supports it.

Olivia Snow has been talking about the harm from AI against sex workers for years now. If you’re paying attention to ethnical issues in tech and surveillance you know that sex workers are the canary in the coal mines. Two years ago Dr. Snow wrote about AI streamlining facial recognition software to detain sex workers at the border. Borders have always been sites of difficulty for sex workers, but the specter of sex work has also been weaponized agains people (mostly marginalized women) to block them from entering the country even when they’re not sex workers. For example, Page Act in 1875 essentially banned all unmarried Chinese women from entering the country because they had trouble proving they weren’t coming here for sexual purposes. Considering the focus on immigration enforcement and the dangerous empowerment of ICE, we should all be considered about the use of AI to police the border. Even if you’re not a sex worker there are technology surveillance tools like geolocation if your cell phone is regularly near the cell phones of suspect people. AI is contributing to the explosion of the surveillance state which starts with sex workers and comes for all of us.

AI is also aiding in private companies being discriminatory. Consider AirBnB banning sex workers from using their site even if they’re booking for a vacation. The only way AirBnB could determine (whether correctly or incorrectly) if a random person booking a stay through their site was a sex worker would be with invasive surveillance technologies combing through our data. You might think its not as big a deal for private companies to act this way but consider how dependent we are on all kinds of private companies for daily necessities. What if you’re banned from banking? Imagine going through your day not using your cell phone or apps anymore. This was doable 20 years ago but its not now.

The same surveillance technologies that targeted sex workers are being turned against people seeking abortions. Flock is an Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR or LPR) company that has been used to track people across state lines to to monitor someone seeking an abortion in a state where its legal (this tool is also unsurprisingly being used by ICE). Period tracking apps employ AI but don’t employ data safety protections so that data can be used against us later. And, like with sex workers, AI analyzing our general internet footprint can decide you’re seeking an abortion based on your geolocation or search history. Every time you put your personal information into ChatGPT you’re giving it access to your data without any protections. You also need to be careful when you go to protests because this surveillance data will be used against you.

We’re also seeing massive layoffs across industries including a third of the Washington Post staff today. Many companies are blaming these layoffs on AI, which again, doesn’t even work! So basically we’re all going to be left jobless without clean drinking water or functional services because some tech bros and the billionaires who fund them are served by the myth of AI. I could keep ranting and ranting about the harm of generative AI but instead I’ll just leave you with a plea to stop using it. Stop validating it. Don’t ask ChatGPT any questions. Don’t have it streamline your code. Don’t use it for research. Avoid apps that rely on AI. Disable the AI features wherever you can on your devices. If we all refuse to use it and starve it of data then maybe we can get everyone to realize that not only does the emperor have no clothes but his not wearing clothes is going to kill us all.