The AI Resistance

Thoughts on the movement against AI adoption

The Middle Ground

I guess the first thing I should say about "AI" as a concept, an idea and a thing that's taken over the world as we know it, is- I'm not pro AI.

I'm not anti AI either- I feel like those labels immediately put people in the "extremes" of any argument and discussion.

Let's talk about how I see, and hear the argument about AI that I often see online.

I obviously lean "left" in many respects, despite my capitalist veneer, and "mercenary for hire" rhetoric around tech careers and navigating the corporate environment.

Which means many folks I socialise with, offline and on, will have views you can expect from that leaning.

Nothing wrong with it.

I can totally see where they're coming from.

However, it does mean, at such point that their beliefs come into contact with a reality that doesn't play well with them, things start to come apart.

The "AI Is a Scam" Argument

Let's run through the argument, and discuss the ideas and challenges this presents, along the way.

“AI Is a Scam, and Has No Value.”

Now, I'm super empathetic to this statement because we lived through NFT's and of course still dealing with Crypto, Blockchain and Web3.

I get it, we have definitely been scammed before.

Comparing AI to NFTs: Not the Same

But AI is not NFT's aka the literal poster child for "tech that has zero value".

How so?

Let's talk about NFTs- what was the value proposition or value exchange? You get a bored Ape image, that you exchange real money for, to be given an address in cyberspace, with a "claim" to that Ape.

Seriously.

Seriously, are you reading that sentence the way I am, while writing it?

It's in-sane!

The value of these things were all in the perception of it, like stocks and futures trading- pure speculation. It was something off into the future that you bet money would still be valuable when you got to that future¹.

NFT's were not tied to anything of value in the real world. Unless, of course, you count your hopes and dreams of a libertarian society as the real world assets this scam was connected to. And like pyramid schemes, aka multi-level marketing programmes, this scam needed people- droves of people to participate in the grift in order to see "value" in the system.

This mainly came in the form of the masses' money being funnelled to the "early adopters" via rug pull.

The Evidence Debate

To make this claim about AI feels somewhat disingenuous to me.

Especially now, when we're 2 years post ChatGPT release, with all the flurry of research, development activity, progress and market signalling.

I've seen those against AI hold up research to show AI doesn't do a thing well, or make a mistake a human wouldn't, or hasn't and will never deliver AGI.

Sure, I get that.

But you can also find research that shows the opposite.

That AI is helping, and improving outcomes- even if it's not where the marketers and the AI grifters have lead us to believe the benefits are coming from.

Evidence-based thinking is a tricky aspect of today's world.

We've lost trust in established institutions founded on science and evidence ~ and rightly so for various organisations for various reasons. We are living in a white supremacist world after all. Do we really think all these incumbent legacy institutions were established with the good of all humanity in mind?

Let's not be naive.

Some deserved to lose their trusted status. Some deserved to no longer be held up as sources of truth.

So, I get that.

But that doesn't mean evidence, scientific methods, research and the pursuit of knowledge, meaning and truth, don't exist anymore- they are more valuable than ever given the day and age we live in.

On one hand, the research that says ‘AI is a hallucinating, confidently incorrect stochastic parrot’.

True, but with nuance.

We don't take it all at face value, despite what major research names may be on the papers. The same way we don't believe everything OpenAI says about… well, about anything really. We listen, we read, we do our best to verify the claims. And if you're doing that to both sides of the argument, I would challenge the view that AI adds no value to anyone using it.

The Value Question

To say AI has "no value" is, to me, to devalue the experiences of those who have managed to utilise the capability the technology has been able to provide.

But AI… yeah, AI burns mad resources, AI does not do everything the grifters and the marketers promise.

AI is not a lot of things, but to say it's "nothing"?

I can’t take the position seriously.

I’m not making a moral judgement on the absolute value of AI, taking into consideration all things that are important to everyone. No.

I’m just asking, was this technology able to help you in a way that you weren’t able to be helped, before?

Making the judgement whether something is adding value somewhere is to understand something's struggle, aspirations, fears and needs. Saying AI is adding nothing to all peoples everywhere, is in my opinion, hubris on a massive scale.

If it adds no value to you, okay, but to dictate to everyone what value it holds to them, is a dangerous precedent that quickly moves to ignorance and then stubbornness.

Real-World Benefits

Has AI helped you in any way?

I was told that whatever help I got from AI, was only perceived, was not real, that it was all wrong and a hallucination.

Did it help you understand a concept you weren't quite sure how to articulate, but was able to converse your way to an understanding with a chatbot?

Ok.

Did it help you build a small app or website? Did it make the experience easier than finding and reading the right tutorial for you? Was it more interactive than watching a video of someone else's setup getting it to work?

Ok.

Were you able to have conversations with a likeness trained on texts and studies? Studies that you might never have the opportunity to read otherwise? Did you glean some insight or knowledge from that conversation, in your own time and space?

Ok.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, I can only speak from mine.

I am someone who uses AI on a daily basis for text, code, images and it has scaled my capacity and capability massively. There is no way I would be able to do the things I'm doing now, without it.

Do I need to check my work?

Of course.

Am I sure this code is bullet proof?

Of course not, but I know how to check, and I know enough to ensure and care about making bulletproof code.

But I’m not going to sit here and act like I haven’t worked with human beings over the last 20 years in tech who haven’t made some horrendous errors in coding, security and operations.

What about text summaries? Same deal, how do I know any human knows everything about everything and is always right? I don't, but how do I get the best out of any expert? I talk, I push, I query, I challenge.

The conversation is what's of value to me, this is not zero-shot copy and paste.

If you were this person before—not checking your work after reading things online and submitting it without filtering it through your own brain—then this is no different.

It just makes it faster for you to produce more slop that looks like everyone else’ slop.

There Are Definitely Problems, in AI

Yes, there are problems.

No-one (well, I'm not) is denying there are issues with the current AI marketplace.

It's full of grift, sustainability issues, bias and toxicity, labour displacement, intellectual property theft, labour displacement, etc.

These are rightfully concerning, and will have a massive effect on society. This is especially true given how quickly the technology is being adopted. Much of this adoption is driven by sales and marketing hype, fear-based arguments for regulatory control, or simple fear of missing out.

There’s folks, even in the Pasifika circles, promoting masterclasses in AI, with no AI background or professional experience- how are we to take these things seriously?

Yes, Sam Altman talks a bunch of shit- "AGI this" and "AGI that" since ChatGPT launched, and we're still on GPT4. I'm not saying developing AI models is easy by any stretch of the imagination, but good lord in heaven STFU with the marketing hype!

But what I am surprised by is that those same folks are reporting that enterprises are finding it difficult to get real ROI from their AI investments. They've commented on the dissatisfaction between what they were told AI could do and what it's actually capable of doing for their business.

No shit, Sherlock- did you hype-market spectators think for a second that this wasn't going to turn out badly? When hype meets reality, did you think there was going to be a happy customer at the end of that story?!

Moving Forward

So yes, there's bullshit-galore in the market. There are AI solutions that are not ready for prime-time being rolled out in education and law enforcement. And people are definitely going to have a bad time.

You can have your value-based views on anything you want. But we don't manoeuvre this world alone - as much as we want or try to. We exist within systems and ecosystems of interconnected people, resources and realities.

But abstaining from the tech, in my view, is not the move.

Unless, of course, you have the majority of the workforce worldwide signed up to join you en-masse? Because if you have that, I'm down for it.

That would actually do something.

My take? The faction that is able to wield this technology, for gain or for survival, gets to hang around. History has shown the folks who abstain from the technology of the time don't usually make it out of that era.

Is that really what you're choosing?

Thanks for reading,

Ron.

1. at least for stocks and futures in real companies, there were products and services created and sold, something of actual value at the end of that rainbow.