*exhaling cigarette smoke* AI is rotten

you ever see the horror movies where the main character shows up to some old rich white person's mansion to take care of it during the summer?

rich people have to migrate south to their winter home or something i don't know i'm not the rich type of white, but many white folk believe we have more in common with rich white people than poor blacks. go figure right?

anyway after the main character settles in to the mansion they start looking around and realize that this mansion is full of hunting trophies and built on the back of enslaved people on top of native american burial grounds. something obviously super evil and represents generational trauma and injustice.

that's basically what it's like to be any sane person looking at AI at the moment. like sure yeah the AI is fancy it can do cool things. it can drink water, run faster, make greater art and code than any other human can even imagine. sarcasm aside, it certainly has brought some good things to this world. but you can say that about almost anything, the question is always cost.

a lot of talk about AI is focused on the environmental and economic costs, which is fair. tech giants are building a ton of infrastructure and throwing unimaginable amounts of money in to AI at the moment and because we live in a world with finite resources we have to deal with the question of whether these resources could be used better.

i am happy people are calling this out but i am also deeply troubled that this is how we are framing the objections to AI. so for a moment let's strongman that AI is actually a perfect product: it consumes nothing, it produces perfect results and is usable by all. it will make your life better by any metric for sure.

there is still the issue of consent, and consent matters. AI is built on top of violating consent: almost all the training data has been taken without consent from the authors of the data, from the places that hold the data, or from the legal system. to push AI is to argue that there is something more important than consent and we can build a society atop it. you can't build something beautiful on a rotten foundation like that. sooner or later it will collapse.

if you ever have the misfortune to read a comment thread by people who push for AI (kinda sad if they're not getting paid, though maybe they're AI bots) a good amount of the comments are 'it's inevitable' and 'you can't stop it'. the message here is that they don't care if you consent to this future, they will make it happen anyway.

tech people are a special type of unhinged that don't understand consent. they don't make things that care about consent. they will ask for permission to access some data then take that as consent to use it however they want. they will see that your wallet is open and take money out of it then blame you for keeping your wallet open.

they will never take responsibility for their misdeeds. having AI as a proxy to blame means nobody needs to take responsibility for anything any more. your AI racially profiles people? hacks another computer? locks you out of your bank? it's nobody's fault, but if it's someone's fault it's the fault that the AI could do that in the first place. the AI had access and that is permission and that is consent, apparently.

if AI is an amazing technology then surely we can work out how to do it consensually. if not, we should say no to it, even if it provides us all the candy we could ask for. consent and process is more important than outcome. we lived without AI for dozens of years we can live without it.

now luckily we're in a situation where AI is actually pretty bad and nobody wants to pay its cost. we should consider ourselves lucky that we have not been offered something perfect that costs our souls.

but it seems like we've come dangerously close, and that's one of the most haunting things i can think of lately.