The EmpAIre Strikes Back

On the bright side, they aren’t sending their best

I’ve written a fair amount about AI over the past three years, starting with this 2023 essay, which was not motivated so much by all the publicity and push for LLMs and whatnot (though I did notice it, as who could not) as by the encroachment of it into my own work — not here, gentle readers, but in my workaday trade journalism, where its effect is not salubrious.

I recognize that AI does have legitimate uses, but I don’t write about those here for a couple of reasons. For one, there are plenty of handsomely-paid flaks and finks pouring it into the puke funnels of the Prestige Press. For another, nearly all these legit uses are outside my immediate area of interest, which may be loosely described as the humanities rather than the “hard” sciences. I am well aware AI has been a great boon in, for example, medical imaging, and one sign that it’s for real is that you get more convincing testimony from actual radiologists than from PR men. But when it comes to literature, journalism, philosophy, etc., you get the worst results, and you also get the hardest PR shoves.

And lately I notice two things about that. For one thing, because (I am guessing) most people experience AI’s negative effect mainly via AI slop and the enshittification of popular information sources like Google — that is, the humanities, broadly understood — rather than via its more positive effect on the sciences, they tend to agree with me that it’s sus as best and big trouble for Western Civ at worst.

And for another, AI advocates seem at least dimly aware of this, and are sending waves of counterattacks in the Prestige Press. Perhaps because the triumphalism to which such people are prone is so strong, however, it creeps even into their public relations, making their arguments less convincing than creepy.

The New York Times is great for this, with previous entries like “Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn’t” (by David Brooks!) and “Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life” (by a doctor, hitting the expected notes, including that without AI health care “costs too much”). A couple of new Times essays on the subjects are especially noteworthy.

In “Dear A.I. Companies, the Doom Trolling Needs to Stop” — doom scrolling, doom trolling, get it? — computer science professor Cam Newport blames the big AI companies themselves for making AI look bad. He notes the ravings of techbros like Sam Altman, who have as much as said that their products are destined to enslave us all; but Newport says nah, they can’t mean it:

If this were true, every reasonable ethical system would argue that there is only one acceptable response: to immediately stop working on any product that might accelerate such a future...

But relax — how could these fellas be serious? It’s not as if tech lords such as Elon Musk are fascist and anti-human! No, they’re just pretending, for effect:

The second option is that these A.I. companies aren’t really concerned about these risks, and that they’re injecting these doses of unresolvable doom for other reasons. They might want to amplify the perceived power of their technology at a time when they’re setting up their initial public offerings. Or they hope their performative reports and somber interviews will help them compete for top engineering talent coming from a Silicon Valley culture that’s steeped in this type of doomerism.

You know how young people getting into tech are: They love hearing that when they’re hired they’ll get straight to work on destroying democracy and perhaps humanity. It’s edgy! Also, the bunkers the tech lords are building for themselves are just part of the pose.

Then there’s “This Doommaxxing Has Got to Stop” (Times editors love au courant pop cultural references), in which Nobel economics laureate Robert J. Shiller lays it on the line:

Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Littlebrains like you and me might rejoin: Yeah, of course AI taking all our jobs doesn’t bother you, but you damn well should worry about the panic that causes among people who need them! Then the professor gets scholastical, as economists confronted with human misery tend to do:

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality...

I know most working class people do not “take” the Times, but if you showed them this bit I expect they would detect, even under the verbal foliage, that they were being told that they’re just bringing these problems/life-and-death issues onto themselves, and then attempt to tear through the paper to get at the author and strangle him.

The rest of the thing is at least as repulsive — seeming to equate the economic effects of, for example, the Great Depression with psychological factors (did you know people spent more money after FDR’s Fireside Chats? Why didn’t Herbert Hoover think of that?) and suggesting that if America’s Forgotten Man had taken a better attitude, the Depression might have ended sooner. But that’s the nub. Oh, and at the end Shiller takes a page from Newport and chastises the tech lords for spooking the proles:

As such, perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your A.I. model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession. Try not to forget the critical lessons taught by our past.

I’m sure when by “the critical lessons taught by our past” Shiller doesn’t mean to evoke the French Revolution, but I like to think such a focus may be imposed upon him.

I know the joke is always “did AI write this” but seriously? If only out of self-interest, I think they’d do a better job.