As the resident tech politics nerd among my friends, I spend a lot of time fielding questions. Help! I’ve been part of a data breach, what do I do? What on earth is crypto and should I care? And lately: should I be worried that AI is going to take over and kill us all?
There is so much hype around artificial intelligence that the concern is understandable but it’s important that we hang on to our critical faculties. The current AI frenzy ultimately serves those who stand to benefit from implementing these products the most but we don’t have to let them dictate the terms of the conversation.
If there is one thing that I try to impart to friends – and now you – it’s this: yes, you should be concerned about AI. But let’s be clear about which boogeyman is actually lurking under the bed. It’s hard to fight a monster if you don’t know what it is. No one wants to be the fool using a wooden stake on a zombie to no avail.
Rather than fretting over some far-flung fear of an “existential threat” to humanity, we should be concerned about the material consequences of far less sophisticated AI technologies that are affecting people’s lives right now. And what’s more, we should be deeply troubled by the way AI is being leveraged to further concentrate power in a handful of companies.
So let’s sort the speculative fiction from reality.
Every other day a high-profile figure peddles a doomsday prediction about AI development left unchecked. Will it lead to a Ministry of Truth à la George Orwell’s 1984? Or perhaps hostile killing machines fresh out of Terminator. Or perhaps it’ll be more like The Matrix.
This all acts as both a marketing exercise for and a diversion from the more pressing harms caused by AI.
First, it’s important to remember that large language models like GPT-4 are not sentient nor intelligent, no matter how proficient they may be at mimicking human speech. But the human tendency towards anthropomorphism is strong, and it’s made worse by clumsy metaphors such as that the machine is “hallucinating” when it generates incorrect outputs. In any case, we are nowhere near the kind of artificial general intelligence (AGI) or “superintelligence” that a handful of loud voices are sounding the alarm on.
The problem with pushing people to be afraid of AGI while calling for intervention is that it enables firms like OpenAI to position themselves as the responsible tech shepherds – the benevolent experts here to save us from hypothetical harms, as long as they retain the power, money and market dominance to do so. Notably, OpenAI’s position on AI governance focuses not on current AI but on some arbitrary point in the future. They welcome regulation, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of anything they’re currently doing.
We need not wait for some hypothetical tech-bro delusion to consider – and fight – the harms of AI. The kinds of technologies and computational techniques that sit under the umbrella marketing term of AI are much broader than the current fixation on large language models or image generation tools. It covers less show-stopping systems that we use – or are used upon us – every day, such as recommendation engines that curate our online experiences, surveillance technologies like facial recognition, and some automated decision-making systems, which determine, for example, people’s interactions with finance, housing, welfare, education and insurance.
The use of these technologies can and do lead to negative consequences. Bias and discrimination is rife in automated decision-making systems, leading to adverse impacts on people’s access to services, housing and justice. Facial recognition supercharges surveillance and policing, compounding the effect of state-sanctioned violence against many marginalised groups. Recommender systems often send people down algorithmic rabbit holes towards increasingly extreme online content. We need not speculate on ways this tech can cause harm; we already have a mountain of evidence from the past decade.
As for generative AI, we are already seeing the kinds of harms that can arise, in far more prosaic ways than it becoming sentient and deciding to end humanity. Like how quickly GPT-4 was spruiked as a way to automate harassment and intimidation by debt collectors. Or how it can turbocharge information manipulation, enabling impersonation and extortion of people, using new tech for old tricks to scam people; or add a hi-tech flavour to misogyny through deepfake porn. Or how it entrenches and seeks to make additional profit from surveillance capitalism business models that prioritise data generation, accumulation and commodification.
The through-line here is that we’re not talking about the danger of some far-off sci-fi future, we’re talking about the amplification of systems and social problems that already exist. Sarah Myers West of AI Now said that the focus on future harms has become a rhetorical sleight of hand, used by AI industry figures to “position accountability right out into the future”. It’s easy to pay attention to the fantastical imaginary of AI, but it is in the more mundane uses where the real, material consequences are happening.
When interviewed about his warnings on the dangers of AI, the so-called “Godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, dismissed the concerns of longstanding whistleblowers such as Timnit Gebru and Meredith Whittaker, claiming their concerns were not as “existential” as his. To suggest that rampant bias and discrimination, pervasive information manipulation, or the entrenchment of surveillance is not as serious as the chimera of AGI is disturbing. What such people fail to realise is that AI does pose an existential threat to many, just not people they care about.
Too often AI is presented as a risk-benefit tradeoff, where the historical evidence and present risks are dismissed as the cost of an overblown hypothetical future. We are told that there is so much potential for good, and that to slow “progress” or “innovation” would prevent us from realising it. But overlooking material impacts of past and present AI in favour of an imaginary future will not lead us to socially progressive technology. And that’s way more worrying than speculative AI overlords.
Samantha Floreani is a digital rights activist and writer based in Naarm
