In my lifetime, few things have pushed their way in to public consciousness and changed our social fabric the way tech has: smartphones, social media, and now AI. Publicly (in this space and in conversations at my neighborhood bar) I don’t hesitate to share my distrust and disdain for tech. Privately, that disdain is far worse and only tempered by the fear that I will be left behind to die on this hill. In the adapt or get run over scenario, I am most-assuredly going to get run over. I might even lie down in the middle of the AI highway to hasten the outcome.
I have my reasons for disliking tech (and yes, I’m painting with very broad strokes when I use the word “tech”). I don’t like that, at best, it’s often rolled out without considering the potential consequences, and at worst, it’s deliberately rolled out in an attempt to manipulate our emotions and capture our attention. As reported on NPR in 2014 (2014!) Facebook conducted an experiment on nearly 700,000 users by altering their news feed to see how it changed their moods. Agreeing to their terms of use “allows” them to conduct such psychological experiments – though they never inform the “participants.” Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, Twitter – they’re all guilty of manipulation, enshittification, and degrading human connection. When given the choice to behave ethically or pursue profits, these companies almost never choose the ethical path.
I’ve disliked tech for a long time (at least 15 years). I’m still mad about having to convert my tape collection to CDs, and after an abusive, multi-year love affair with my phone, I’ve gotten much better at not checking it on walks or when I’m out in public. In fact, I now shake my head in scornful judgment at the people who can’t seem to look up from their phone. My first attempt to wrestle with this long-festering dislike was when I registered this domain name in February of 2010. It was my own personal rebellion against, and response to Facebook and the quick, short-form text platform Twitter. I disliked the pace of the world into which we were being thrust (without consent). I wanted something decidedly slower. Long-form writing that required greater attention, patience, and thought. At the time, unemployed and in grad school, I spent a lot of time on social media (too much). I began to recognize how it hijacked my attention, caused anxiety, gave me a creeping sense of FOMO (fear of missing out – especially on slow news days), and made me feel disconnected. At the same time, we graduate students in the school of education were being told to meet our young people where they were and to try to use these technologies in both as an educational tool and as a way of connecting.
It turns out, that might not have been wise council or sound pedagogy. Now, as we’re beginning to see, test scores in both reading and math have been in a decade-long decline, the timing of which coincides with the explosion of social media use among young people. As quoted in a recent article in Time, Harvard professor and an author of the Educational Scorecard report notes, “’we actually don’t fully understand all of the ways in which social media is affecting youth,’” though use of such platforms has been shown to decrease students’ attention spans, disrupt sleep, and produce anxiety.”
If social media was bad for us, our children, our mental health, and our education, AI might be worse. Almost daily, we are seeing stories of people in almost every industry claiming that their brains are turning to mush because they use AI too much (not just AI psychosis, not just the instances when AI convinced someone to commit suicide, or gave instructions on how to commit a mass shooting, but a loss of thinking capacity). From the Harvard Gazzette, “A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities.” Or consider this recent headline from Psychology Today, “Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them.” That doesn’t sound great.
Where social media was able to toggle the algorithm of what we see and read, AI is allowing us to create, with blistering speed and incredible believability, levels of mis-information the world has never seen. The very notion of truth is under assault, and few people seem to have the willingness to tackle it politically, or opt out personally. I see and hear this every day. The other night while walking to my local bar, a group of 20 somethings were returning from a softball game and one was saying he was going to use AI to merge a video of his friend (who couldn’t hit very well) with a video of a home run being hit out of Giant Stadium. Much of how the casual user uses AI is “innocent enough” (though it still comes with high environmental costs) we will increasingly see the misuse of this technology. There are already reports of hacking into financial systems, making deep fakes of politicians, and generating non-consensual porn images of underage people.
The overlords in charge like to remind us to remain calm, like to remind us that we were afraid of the automobile, and the television, etc. etc. They seldom hide their disdain for public will or opinion. After the widespread booing at the mention of AI in a recent commencement speech, it was reported that Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once received similar treatment at one of his commencement speeches. Though I’m having trouble finding the transcript (perhaps it’s AI deepfake) he’s reported to have said, “My hope is that you will choose to engage, that you choose to be in the room where these decisions take place, and to have a voice in how they’re made.” Yet he knows, as well as anyone would, that none of us are in the room where these decisions are being made. None of us have a say in how this technology is being developed or deployed. It just shows up in our apps and software and in the algorithms that determine what we pay at the grocery store.
To date, aside from one image that I created for this blog, and whatever Google forces down my throat in their top-of-page AI overview, I have avoided using AI. There are, of course, a whole lot of exceptions that the technical purists will point out is AI. When I go to create marketing collateral and I allow the computer to align the text – that’s a type of AI. Autocorrect, autocomplete, auto-anything is AI powered or AI adjacent. I don’t avoid using those tools – though in many cases, I think I’d be fine if they didn’t exist. What I won’t do, is use AI for writing and I won’t support AI music, art, or any instance in which AI seems to degrade the human spirit. Ultimately, this may prove to be significantly disadvantageous to me: in the workforce, in the competition for housing, or investments, or general life. When I say I want to retire, it’s because I don’t want any more of this bullshit forced on me. I don’t want to outsource my thinking or creativity.
And yet, in very real ways it is impacting the work I do and the way that works gets done. Today I read a short social media post in which the person shared that a foundation they work with received over 1500 grant applications (they typically receive 200 per year). They’re not giving out more money, and they don’t have the staff to adequately wade through all of those applications. The increase is due to AI. Organizations that previously didn’t have the capacity to write and submit an application are using AI to do the work. On the surface, some might think this is a good thing, but dig a little deeper and one can see how this could be disastrous. First is the perception problem. AI has a habit of overstating one’s capabilities and being over-effusive in its writing. An agency that lacks the capacity to write a grant might also lack the capacity to execute on a grant. Beyond that, being flooded with proposals almost guarantees that good and thoughtful proposals will be overlooked. Additionally, the unintended impact of being flooded with proposals will be that some foundations will no longer offer open calls for proposals and will shrink back to invitation-only proposals. It’s hard to see a scenarios where the glut of AI generated content turns out to be a net positive in this particular space.
On a more personal level, it infiltrated my day-to-day job when I was working as a grant writer. At the time, the organization I was working for was trying to understand how to integrate AI into our business. I, along with a few of my colleagues, was not overly-enthusiastic about this prospect. My initial objection to integrating AI into our business was an economic and environmental one. Nationally, we were known as an agency that served kids from low-income communities – often minorities who had suffered several adverse childhood experiences (those most closely associated with living in poverty). At the time, one of the largest AI data centers was using over 30 gas-fired turbines and an ungodly amount of water to keep the servers running. It happened to be located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee, which also has one of the highest rates of asthma in the state. Those turbines and their emissions (controversial because they skirted existing environmental law) almost certainly exacerbated the poor health conditions in the surrounding community. I kept thinking, how, in good conscious, could we use a technology that disproportionately hurts the very people we aim to serve. Nevertheless, in the name of efficiency and doing more with less, we were using it.
Not only were we using, but in one instance my supervisor handed me a grant written by AI and asked me to clean it up. The technology had knocked directly on my door. I did the clean up – and there were more than a few factual errors. When I turned it back in for review I was asked to remove the em dashes because using them is a sign that someone used AI. So, to be clear, we cared about being perceived as using AI, but we’re going to use it and try to hide the evidence? Also, on behalf of writers everywhere, to anyone making the em dash argument, fuck off. Writers use em dashes all the time and AI has been trained on the work of real humans (without their consent and in some case probably in violation of copyright). I didn’t quite know it at the time, but not only did it feel like a vote of no-confidence in my work, but having been given AI writing to clean up proved to be very un-motivating. One of the main reasons I had been hired was for my ability to write. I had written things for the marketing team, written for the annual report, written annual appeal letters… I don’t know a single person who enjoys writing who would prefer the “efficiency” of AI to the work of writing. As one person put it, I wouldn’t want a computer to eat a pizza for me. I happen to like eating pizza.
I know there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. I know, short of some Armageddon scenario, we’re not going back to a time before – before social media, before AI, before we decided to move fast, break things, and leave the world in disarray. I, and everyone I know, will have to figure out how to deal with these new realities in our own personal way. More of it will be forced on us (surveillance tech in the office, slop clogging up the internet and drowning out factually accurate content). I suspect, that like all tech, my personal resistance will wear down, and it will become an “indispensable” part of life much the way cell phones have become “necessities.” Until that day, I’m going to try to hold out – to advocate for responsible guardrails (how about we watermark all AI generated content?), to support human endeavors, and to dream about a life full of art and beauty off the grid.