June-ish 2024 AI Ethics Round-up
June-ish 2024 AI Ethics Round-up
This week's article covers differing opinions about the impact of AI on creatives, the workforce, and elections from around the Substack-verse.
Things are finally calming down enough for me to start writing regularly again. I've missed having the headspace to write weekly. But we're getting back there, and I'm excited about it. It's been quite a while since I've done a round-up, and now seemed like a good time.
is one of the first Substacks that I subscribed to when I joined the platform. I appreciate the balanced approach that Dr. Mollick brings--it's not fawning about the absolute good of AI or decrying it as the end of human civilization. He is more pragmatic. In one of his recent posts, he writes about doing stuff with AI. He starts by covering the fun stuff, like using models to create a song, and then he goes into the more serious usage, mostly in a business setting. One phrase he used stuck out to me, "always invite AI to the table." I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's pragmatic for sure, but also slightly anthropomorphizes AI as a thing that needs to be invited.Check it out, and let me know how you feel about the phrase "Always invite AI to the table."
Next up, I found this article from
of titled "Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our job." Merchant takes a more hopeful tone in this piece but highlights the risk that AI poses to creative disciplines. One point he made that I particularly liked--even if AI isn't used in the workplace, the threat of AI can still be used to suppress the working class. We don't often consider the indirect impact of AI, so the idea that just the existence of AI can be used to disenfranchise workers was interesting to me.What do you think? Do we do enough to consider the impact that AI causes by just existing?
One thing that Merchant Highlights is that creative jobs are particularly susceptible to replacement by AI. What I loved about this next article is that it makes the exact opposite point.
of argues that execs should be the people who are worried about AI, not creatives. His argument centers around the value of the human creative process and intent in the creative process, which AI can't replicate. As the tsunami of AI-generated content hits the internet, people are going to value the unique, human-created art more.He also uses the perfect phrase to describe AI usage today:
Let’s shoehorn AI into every technological crevice we can find. You know, the way mold grows insidiously in cracks in the pavement, or on the damp walls of your poorly ventilated bathroom.
What do you think? At the end of the day when AI fails to live up to the hype, who will be left holding the bag?
Finally, there's been furor about the (negative) role of AI in the upcoming US elections. Most of this furor has been around the ease of disinformation that can be created to change the narrative.
of challenges this narrative, saying much of the doom and gloom hasn't materialized as everyone predicted. There's logic to this, many of these predictions didn't take into account our changing relationship with media as a result of the threat of disinformation that began in 2016 and continues to evolve today. People don’t accepted what they read online as fact as readily as they did before.Is the use of AI a threat to the US election in the fall, or is it overstated doom and gloom? Is AI just making everything more efficient, as Micah says?
