AI only maintains the conservative status quo

AI (sidenote: or whatever thing that corporations are aggressively marketing as “AI” ) is being used to systematically reject Black and Hispanic tenants and monitor incarcerated people in a Georgia prison.

AI has been so rapidly embraced, in recent years, as the newest form of pulling things out of your ass, that I rarely flinch at its mention anymore.

But those two stories made me pause and re-feel the fresh anger I felt, as a college student, when using AI to flub papers became common practice.

When my students with learning disabilities, already told by schools all their lives that they were shit at writing, decided to use AI rather than even try.

When it became easy to make deepfake porn of non-consenting people.

When instead of hiring a young man to play Indiana Jones, (sidenote: Come to think of it, why are we still making movies about goddam Indiana Jones? Raiders of the Lost Ark was great. Second movie was shit. Third was only decent because it reminded us all of the first one. I won’t even discuss the fourth. Let things die with dignity. ) they “de-aged” an 80-year-old man, and everybody just went with it.

And here we are today, with AI accepted and embraced by our speed-obsessed, hyper-individualistic society. We’ve reached the point that AI is now being pushed in public schools, (sidenote: Source: I work in one. ) alienating students even further from quality, human-driven educations that focus on their holistic growth rather than their test scores.

I guess, since AI is ✨ magic ✨, the Jim Crow-bot that’s rejecting Black tenants will just be seen as a one-off fluke, instead of part of a larger problem.

I am vehemently disgusted and disappointed, but I am not surprised:

AI has only been fed with narratives that already exist. It can’t pull from anything that hasn’t been created yet. And it can’t create something that diverges from the existing narrative.

The more it is fed with something, the more it is “true.”

With the way the world currently is, the majority of voices we hear are white voices. The loudest voices we hear are able-bodied voices. The most respected voices we hear are male voices.

So these are the voices whose narratives AI is going to mimic.

AI is very unlikely, on its own, to “think” in ways that are different, challenging, or compassionate towards “anomalies.” It offers nothing new. It can only do what it knows.

It only reflects and strengthens the status quo.

And with the American status quo being what it is, that disturbs me.

Reject computer-generated work in the name of speedy output. It is sloppy, it is silly, it is devoid of meaning or integrity.

Reject the idea that an algorithm should think for you or anyone else.

Remain curious about the world, about tools, about people, about your mind. Express yourself, practice creativity, share your insight.