Pushing back against AI’s ‘inevitability’

There is a great scene in a recent episode of the HBO Max comedy Hacks, in which comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), takes a meeting with a Tech Bro who wants her to train an LLM (large language model) in her style of comedy so that people can write funnier bridesmaid speeches, essentially. Her collaborator/head writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) has reservations.

“AI is here and it’s here to stay, so you either get on board or you get left in the past,” the Tech Bro tells her.

“See, that is a big part of why I hate it, this forced inevitability,” Ava responds. “People like you are always saying, ‘It’s happening whether you like it or not,’ but you’re the ones making it happen.”

Ding, ding, ding. “Forced inevitability” is exactly it, and it’s the thing I hate about it, too.

“It’s happening whether you like it or not.” Why? Because Big Tech — which, best I can tell, is just three billionaires in a polar-fleece vest — says so?

Allow me, in my best Samantha Jones voice: Oh, honey, no.

Actually, AI can’t “happen whether we like it or not” if people, in fact, don’t like it. They won’t use it. They’ll resist it and protest it. Or loudly insist it has to have regulations and safety guardrails and environmental criteria it must meet in order for them to even consider using it — the kind of friction Big Tech no likey.

“You’ll be left behind!” is usually the other part of the argument for AI.

Yeah, so, about that: I’m good. AI can absolutely leave me behind. I love being left — left be, left alone, big fan in all formats.

Besides, I am banking on the fact that the ability to use my own brain to write a sentence or complete the most basic of tasks will become a highly covetable and marketable skill in, like, less than a decade.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not anti-technology. I’m anti-Big Tech forcing AI down our throats in order to better surveil us and take away our jobs while destroying the environment.

And just as I don’t think you should need an app to use a toaster, I don’t think AI needs to be ubiquitous or inevitable. “It’s happening whether we like it or not” is so weirdly defeatist. We need more raging against the machine and less acquiescing to the machine.

So, I’m happy to see TV shows pushing back against it, as well as young people protesting it; my new favourite trend is university graduates booing commencement speeches touting AI. I was similarly happy to see the social media smackdown that greeted the Winnipeg Sun for using an AI image on the front page.

Because here’s the thing: it’s not like AI is good. I’m struggling to see what the most vociferous AI proponents (certain celebrities, tech bros) are defending besides their own bank accounts, especially when we’re talking about generative AI.

I’ve yet to see its supposedly “revolutionary” capabilities, especially at a general-population user level. How is a plagiarizing slop bot that hallucinates information a useful tool in any way?

And like Ava in Hacks, I’m concerned about how much it’s being used for that most human expression — creativity — even at a small, everyday level.

I promise you can write that Instagram caption or that condolence message or that bridesmaid speech without ChatGPT. And if you truly can’t, use a poem or a song lyric that was written by a human who has actually felt the feeling you’re trying to articulate.

AI’s big promise is speed and efficiency.

Controversial opinion, but not everything needs to be fast or efficient — especially creativity, which, in my experience, is actually a pretty slow and inefficient process. There are no shortcuts. You have to put in the work.

And that work isn’t always legibly “productive” in the way capitalism defines it: there’s a reason why in the AMC series Mad Men, whenever advertising genius Don Draper (Jon Hamm) got writer’s block or stuck on an idea, he went to the movies or took a nap. Because that’s what creating looks like sometimes.

We don’t have to accept a world where Big Tech gets to decide how we live our lives or how we relate to each other or how we express ourselves. We do not have to accept planned obsolescence or forced inevitability.

To borrow a bit from John Lennon: AI is over if you want it.

winnipegfreepress.com/jenzoratti