Thinking About *Thinking About* A.I.
a shortlist of why it's annoying to have to do this
First off, thanks for subscribing. I have drafts in various stages that I’m eager to share with you. Whenever I work on these, “A.I.” loves to butt itself into every topic and I would like to simply pretend it does not exist.
Why does this have to be a condition of writing about culture or education now? It’s like when you read a Substack post, you just know there’s going to be a subscribe now button after the first few paragraphs.
Even though I accept that no writer can fully detach from the spirit of their time, we are still allowed to hate it. And hatred is one of a writer’s great inspirations. In this post, I will share three categories of why I hate having to address A.I.
40 Year Old Virgin
I have bring in some discussion about the implications of A.I. for almost any subject and this was not the case five years ago. Whenever I read a social media post about A.I., it is almost always embarrassing; the fact that the writer admitted to themselves that they live in the world and have to acknowledge it. Whenever I do it, as I am now, I feel like a middle-aged man wearing a “crossbody sling” across his Under Armor compression top.
A Wirecutter model with no business wearing that huge bag like that. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-fanny-packs/
To be clear, I do own a few crossbody slings. Sometime in 2022 I bought one from Bellroy after having carried a backpack everywhere for a few years. This included my work computer, but also a smaller set of “everyday carry” items (oh my god) that I genuinely need with me outside of work that did not fit into my pockets. I searched for something bigger than a fanny pack but smaller than a messenger bag and that’s what I got.
I was a slightly early adopter (not so early that there weren’t brands selling them). But I could get away with it for about four months until I started looking like every girl student on campus. Yes, this product is fit for purpose, but being associated with a trend makes me want to die now. (I’m 41, which is close to death.) Many of us are now thinking about A.I. but it’s embarrassing to do it publicly.
Large Language Scold
Many of you know I come from the world of “Open Access” - a concept that refers to articles (of peer-reviewed research, most often) that are free to read without a paywall. If you are familiar with open access, you also know how superficial that description is. There are so many distinctions about how articles are made open access that there is a whole-ass mineral and metal naming system that nobody normal understands.
A jpg I stole from pinterest showing 12 different Pokemon game titles, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/491033165595631577/
While categorization is necessary to have in-depth policy discussion, it’s also annoying! And it keeps most people outside of the scholarly communication world from being able to engage casually. Good. Stay away you unwashed masses! Just kidding. You don’t want to be here anyway. Trust me. Anyway, that’s how I feel when I think or talk about A.I.
There are distinctions between large language models, GenAI, NormieAI, and whatever else, but sometimes I just want to sound like a human and say Kleenex when referring to any disposable sheet you can blow snot into. Does this make me sound uninformed? Probably. Am I uninformed? Probably? Are you judging me when I say “A.I.” to refer to anything? Are you the police.
r/LinkedInLunatics
Some people who do write about A.I. tend to either fall into the camp of full A.I. Believers (who mail their life savings to the televangelists) or they are bratty teenage A.I. Atheists (adamant that none of it could possibly be real).
I would classify myself as something like an A.I. agnostic. They’re calling it A.I. Agnosticism and your kid may be texting about it. I’m open to the idea that much of it is bullshit, but it is also possible that some applications may be real and legitimate.
In short, everybody else is dumb, but the way that I think about this topic is perfectly calibrated by my wise brain.
Larry Harmon as Bozo the Clown
There is a ton of hype and much of it is unfounded and buying into it without reservation is dumb. There is evidence that A.I. already leads to bad outcomes and that it seems on a trajectory toward more. A good Thought Leader might group into these harms into the four Es:
Education - A.I. is making cheating too easy and students aren’t actually learning foundational skills as a result
Employment - A.I. is not only killing jobs, it’s killing the wrong ones
Ethics - A.I. is trained on stuff it shouldn’t be and doing things it most certainly shouldn’t
Environment - A.I. is hurting air, land, and water that life generally relies on
These all suck and give reason to call into question the claims of the A.I. True Believers. But its inverse—holding zero curiosity about its potential practical uses—prunes whole branches of thinking, which also hobbles intellectual capacity.
Show me the car fax
By many metrics, “A.I.” is annoying and bad. It’s annoying writers can’t leave the catnip alone or that readers must always drag their retinas across the resultant trail of kitty litter. Most importantly, it’s making things more unpredictable in almost every sector. We’re at the start of this and the future is not inevitable.
An image of the carfax fox mansplaining to a lady on a parkbench
Sometimes I use cars to think about where this all goes. Cars are useful for comparison because they were also a hugely disruptive invention that ravaged the planet, obliterated communities, and whose manufacture was linked with Nazism.
Would you travel back in time to kill Baby Henry Ford? (Well, yes, maybe.)
But if you imagine going back to a time before the automobile became an entrenched entity, it’s worth thinking about the new freedom that cars would eventually afford us. Not just the vain Kerouac On The Road brand of freedom, but the kind that would allowed people to move independently to better lives and away from impoverished and even dangerous ones. It’s also entirely possible to make a cleaner and safer car.
I won’t make the argument that A.I. will make us all freer, happier, or healthier. It might do the opposite. All I’m saying is, please don’t yell at those of us who occasionally consider trying out an overhyped sling. When you gain an extra pocket, you are able to carry a few more potentialities around with you.
I mean, keep yelling when appropriate. If we yell at the right people, we might just get them to pay workers a fair wage to make non-embarrassing slings from appropriately recycled materials.