the bad & the ugly

The capitalist AI future is bullshit by design — AKA ‘mansplaining as a service’.

“Today’s highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design. To be clear, bullshit can sometimes be useful, and even accidentally correct, but that doesn’t keep it from being bullshit. Worse, these systems are not meant to generate consistent bullshit — you can get different bullshit answers from the same prompts.” —Anil Dash 2023

What are the benefits of AI adoption in organizations? Not good for many workers it seems.

“The rise of AI technology could decrease hiring in the next five years, according to a recent survey by recruiting agency Adecco.
More than 40% of senior executives at over 2,000 companies interviewed by Adecco stated that they expected their workforces to shrink soon because of AI.
Adecco’s research included companies from industries like pharmaceuticals, logistics and defence” —Verdict (UK) 2024

Is generative AI actually degenerative?

“Gen AI is degenerative because it doesn’t serve our communities; rather, it feeds on us, on our content, our data, our rights and our privacy. It is extractive and divisive, it avoids responsibility for our losses, and it doesn’t care at all about the prosperity of our living systems.
Gen AI is degenerative. Or at least, the business models of the companies are degenerative. So the question becomes: can AI be regenerative?” —Matthew Moran 2024

History repeats, or at least it rhymes.

“Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta extracting data and creating AI models without consent shares many parallels with Imperialism and the ways in which land was taken from indigenous peoples. Even the arrogance required to insist Big Tech know what’s best for society is shared by Imperialist nations … The pace of AI research is depressingly fast. Depressing because currently the Ultra Wealthy are the ones pioneering the research, in some cases backed by the Effective Altruism movement. It’s as if our only strategy is to sit patiently and wait to have another model shared with us from Big Tech and then spend entire conferences and research careers probing and prodding models trained by our Tech Lords.” —Papa Reo 2023

Have we reached peak AI?

“I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech. Once usage drops, so will the remarkable amounts of revenue that have flowed into big tech, and so will acres of data centers sit unused, the cloud equivalent of the massive overhiring we saw in post-lockdown Silicon Valley.
I fear that the result could be a far worse year for the tech industry than we saw in 2023, one where the majority of the pain hits workers rather than the ghouls who inflated this perilous bubble.” —Ed Zitron 2024

This post is a follow-up from January 2024 where I summarized the good, the bad, and the ugly of automation & algorithms during the past year.