ai is a pox on all our houses

I'm not into ai. I don't use siri, I figured out how to  bypass the google search ai overview. I don't use predictive text or autocorrect (my texts be CRAZY sometimes). My only brushes with ai are the endless slog of ai commercials during sports, which remind me a whole bunch of when capital tried to force feed crypto down our throats a couple years ago. You'd think they wouldn't need to do that if ai had a groundswell of support. Makes me wonder...
 

Anyway, here are the reasons I don't fuck with it.

It is bad for the environment. The data centers are making surrounding communities sick, they're basically a Saruman mining orcs in Isengard Two Towers kinda situation. They drain an obscene amount of water, which certainly won't be a problem in western parts of the United States. It drives up our utility bills - which if we're being real, is reason enough for some of these buildings...and I'm trying to do this in passive voice like the new york times talking about cops shooting unarmed black people...these buildings could become irreparably harmed in a fire involved incident.

On a person to person level, its bad for people's brains. It replaces critical thinking skills with a poor simulacrum of smarts and reasoning. Its benjamin buttoning people back into being helpless babies that have no idea how to do anything for themselves. Where are people's pride? You're gonna trade on your value as a person so that you can shirk a little bit of typing or reading? Pitiful.

There is also this whole thing where scumbags and far right incels are happily using grok and other programs to create deepfake child porn. Vaya con dios, y'all. This alone should be enough to deposit the whole ai project into the Pacific.

Whether you like it or not, it's now shoehorned into every product you use on the computer. I don't need gmail's ai to summarize a fifteen word email from a friend. Honestly, an email from a friend is the best kind of email you can get, why the fuck would I want to outsource the pleasure of reading whatever it is someone I know and like sent me?

 

It has killed google search. Those little ai overviews people take as gospel at the top of your search query, well those are wrong, like, a lot. ai just be sayin shit sometimes. As someone who loves bullshitting, I don't appreciate when my computer tries to bullshit with me. We aren't friends, computer, youre a tool. We're aren't doing repartee.

Between ring cameras, which have always been hilariously stupid considering who will eventually have access to the footage (they sell it to law enforcement), and ai facial recognition, we're now in a permanent surveillance state. I, for one, think you should be able to get away with a non-violent caper from time to time. Unfortunately that is no longer an option with ai on the case. And then imagine you weren't involved in said caper and ai hallucinates that you are. I don't like the idea of being on the hook for a crime I didn't commit because of a half-baked police app that wrongfully thinks it maybe recognized my face.

 

The commercials for ai are incredibly condescending to the project of humanity. Especially the one about claude planning out your road trip. Why wouldn't you want to pick your own spots to stop and sightsee. I would prefer to look up and figure out which restaurants look good along the way. Some of us are real eaters that barely trust other humans to make food recommendations, you think I'm gonna listen to some robot tell me what the best mexican restaurant is cause it gleaned some inaccurate info from a deranged yelp reviewer? Also, I want to pick my own fucking music for the ride. Why skip the part of the process that is literally you finding and getting excited about all the details of the impending adventure? Why not just have claude tell you how the trip went instead of doing it.

 

Big tech wants you to think that the all-encompassing prevalence of ai is some inevitable outcome, that it's futile to resist. I refuse to believe that, mostly because these tech titans have been shown time and again to be grifters and hucksters, lyle lanleys selling a new-aged monorail. Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, the WeWork guy. Were they all on the up and up? Or were they just selling magic beans?

 

Ever wonder why the tech overlords are so gung ho about ai? Outside of all of them wagering a lot of their and other people's money on it and desperately needing it to succeed, its also because the bosses want to use it to weaken an already vulnerable labor force. The idea that ai can take all our jobs is tantalizing to them. They would love to put us all in a more precarious position so that we will accept shittier working conditions and paltry wages and not be able to complain. These motherfuckers' idealized version of the workforce has everyone pissing in company store bought water bottles sitting at their stations. If you can lean you can clean ass outlook on employees.

I would suggest we not go along with an idea that was spun wholecloth by a couple morally bankrupt tech companies as a new buzz word cash cow. Just because ai being is trumpeted by a pot committed media as a fait accompli, doesn't mean you have to believe it. The bubble will burst, and the tech and finance world will move on to their next con. I'm not gonna be holding the bag.