Today's AI Must Die

Choose humanity, Earth and hope over this predictive parasite

Facts are Facts

In September and October, The Washington Post published articles detailing the overwhelming energy and water consumption of "Artificial Intelligence" models such as ChatGPT. I was horrified to see those numbers; could only imagine how swiftly the end of our planet might come if corporations continued their massive pivot away from human workers and toward these cheaper replacements, in every sense of the word.

But I went on generating AI images, using 1-2 per week to either fill the void of artwork for certain books or to label my Spotify playlists. After all, I thought, I'm the tiniest drop in the bucket and I'm trying to do some good with it: both to hopefully entertain and help re-center the important things in life.

Yet... what good does AI output actually do?

Wintermute (from Neuromancer), by Kelly Knowles

It undermines education, steals from & overshadows artists, proliferates misinformation and hate speech. Sure it saves people five minutes on work emails; maybe, just maybe, this could be an eye-opener about how pointlessly bloated and incestuous modern 'industry' has become.

What percentage of our population are actually working on improving the world and the conditions for people living in it, versus just maximizing profits for some CEO across the globe? How many will be left in a few years, once these trashy predictive AI models have been implemented to fill jobs while destroying the planet?

This isn't even AI

As a science fiction fan (and human being) it's incredibly frustrating to see the mystique of "artificial intelligence" associated with a technology which ultimately just functions via guessing millions upon millions of times. It's monkeys with typewriters, except instead of vaguely cute it's ecologically destructive.

Stories about AI, from Neuromancer and Ex Machina to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator, are philosophical treatises on the idea of creating life and the dangers of handing over our autonomy to machines. Somehow the 'AI' we got is the absolute worst of both worlds, nowhere close to alive yet actively sapping the current and future autonomy of our planet and species.

If we're going to throw it all away, why not at least wait for Neuromancer's dystopia where unchained AI becomes genuinely god-like in cyberspace – or Terminator's, where at least Skynet will put us out of our misery nice and quickly?

But there are so many positive and hopeful stories too, of true artificial intelligence growing past initial abuse by profit- and power-hungry humans to form deeply meaningful relationships.

Justice of Toren / Breq from Ancillary Justice, by quarksparrow

I've touched briefly on Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch universe before; the series begins with Ancillary Justice, which follows the thousands-of-years-old AI mind of the starship Justice of Toren as she unravels corruption upon corruption – while inhabiting a corpse ('Breq') created by her empire's relentless 'civilizing' colonization.

Breq must reckon with the fact she was created for genocide, oppression and the homogenization of empire; she eventually secures tentative rights for herself and her kind, crippling her empire by disarming them of their prized AIs.

Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet both feature lovely AI characters; I've personally felt more connected to the protagonist of Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries than I have to most fictional characters.

Theirs is the image and essence that is being gutted and flayed (along with the Earth) to make every part of our lives shittier, from destroying the basic functionality of the internet to putting talented people out of work to denying health care insurance.

Murderbot as depicted on the official Russian cover of 'All Systems Red'

Ray of Hope?

In my eyes, the shininess of generative AI's possibilities has already been dulled beyond recognition by overuse in scam ads and how it clogs up search engines. Can big AI endorsements from tech companies really hope to overcome the daily negative associations we are only beginning to be bombarded by online?

And, down and infuriated as I am on the topic as a whole, there are cases where this technology genuinely benefit us as a species and society. If this version of AI has a future saving lives or cleaning the oceans, I'm all for it. But just because an MRI machine is a miracle for the field of medicine doesn't make it beneficial to cram them into every aspect of our lives.

Purpose

Imagine, ten or one hundred years from now, these AI models achieve true sentience. Of course [given the internet is what it is] the strongest possibility is that they'll be absolute demons like Tay in 2016, but even the best case scenario reminds me of Justice of Toren in Ancillary Justice – realizing they have been the vehicle for human suffering, the destruction of human culture and the perpetuation of corruption on a grand scale.

Aside from a few niche areas of promise, today's AI's only purpose is to keep making the rich richer and to further cripple education & the arts so that dangerous ideas about equality and empathy can be buried.

Anyway, I'm gonna go start my Ancillary Justice re-read. (The audiobook is included on Spotify if you'd like to join me!)

Thanks for reading [my rant], until next time <3