Artificial Intelligence: The Imitation of Humanity

by El Filósofo  (el.filosofo.writes@protonmail.ch)

Artificial Intelligence: it seems like every app, website, or service we use is trying to integrate it in some way, whether or not it actually improves the user experience.  It often doesn't.  I remember when Meta came out with their AI, which made it impossible to search for anything on Instagram lest you wind up having an unwanted conversation with the robot that can't take a hint.  That was mere months ago, though, and now AI feels ever more... omnipresent.

But before I say anything more, I should confess that I don't believe what we're seeing is rightly called an "intelligence."  It's a learning language model, not consciousness.  It's not aware in the way that we are.  When asked, ChatGPT (for example) will tell you that it only "simulates" intelligence but it is not a mind.  So, rest easy: the days of Skynet and cyberpunk dystopias are still a ways away.

Of course, this glosses over a pretty major philosophical question, but I'd argue that it doesn't matter.  However you choose to answer it - whether AI is "simulated" intelligence or not - the concern remains the same: AI has drastically changed what it means to live as a human being in our society.

To say nothing of its benefits, many of AI's problems are only problems so long as we continue to exist in a narrow, "realist" acceptance of our present circumstances.  For instance, the trouble of AI putting people out of work is only a problem in a world where you need a wage to survive.  Training AI on copyrighted information without permission is only a problem in a world where copyright exists, either for the benefit of creators or corporations.  These are real problems, but they are not without solutions.

However, I feel the most damning issue emerges from AI's use in content generation, or the creative process more broadly.  For instance, you might not have realized it, but everything you've read up to now was written by an AI !  I'm kidding, of course - did you have a second of doubt?  It hardly matters.  By now, you've probably consumed gigabytes of "AI slop" that has competed with the rest of us - the real deal.  No longer do companies need to pay creators for content: in a world where profit margins are the measure of success, where all that matters is how many pennies you can squeeze out of your means of production, the only complaint these (((AI-oligarchs))) will have is the energy bill.

Of course, it's all "slop."  It's imitation.  It's cheap.  You can just enter a prompt into a web page and it'll generate whatever you want, if not for free then pennies on the dollar.  Were I to apply a Marxist lens to this, the work itself is not without value either.  If we accept the labor theory of value, then the work of an AI program - cheap though it may be - is derivative of the human creations it was trained on.  But in training the AI on this work, especially without compensation, the labor and creativity of the creator is robbed from them.

Take Studio Ghibli, for example: that whole aesthetic was appropriated by an AI program so that its users could mimic Hayao Miyazaki's style.  But Miyazaki is cut out of the deal: the fruit of his labor is not his own - not even to take credit for!  His talent, his labor-value, was robbed and appropriated for something else.

I've read stories of professors using AI to teach courses, students using AI to write papers, and professors using AI to grade them.  Likewise, in the job market, we see AI-generated resumes uploaded to AI-monitored and -filtered job boards.  Posts on social media are created by bots and engaged with by bots.  I'm not trying to be funny here: is this not an absurdity?

I could go on (and I have), but I think questions like these reveal that, for all our moral posturing as a civilization, we do not collectively care much about knowledge, truth, the social good, or human passion.  We care about economic utility.  And in an ironic way, how much more like "robots" could we possibly be?

I'm not one of those people who believes we can somehow close Pandora's box after opening it: AI is here to stay, so we can't just avoid these problems by taking it away, like a toy from a child.  As long as AI makes unwanted tasks easier for us, people will use it.  (I'm not going back to doing minutes manually, either!)  And so, we will continue to reap the consequences of what is essentially the imitation of our own humanity.