Opponents of AI are often depicted as naive and ignorant.

[cxiao@infosec.exchange]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/116456942253634796

Opponents of AI are often depicted as naive and ignorant. We are depicted as having our heads buried in the sand, unwilling to accept the great capabilities of AI, or as insecure and afraid of AI's capabilities.

I would like to flip this narrative around: I think pro-AI technologists who only look at AI's "capabilities" are the naive ones.

This is because the AI industry and the people funding, producing, and pushing AI tools are not at all working on the level of capability - they are working on the level of AI as ideology. They are interested in AI as a tool to devalue labour, suppress wages, justify layoffs, and foster dependency on centralized tools controlled by a few companies. Technologists who only focus on "this code can be written good by this tool" are not even playing on the right level. Programmers talking about "wow! look at the code it can generate!" feel to me at this point like the 2-dimensional inhabitants of Flatland.

Perhaps this sounds conspiracy-minded to you, but the way in which AI is practically being deployed across industries is very stark evidence of this. The quoted employee monitoring at Meta, to gather data for using AI to devalue the work of white-collar workers, is just one example. AI mandates, token usage dashboards, performance reviews based on AI adoption, AI code acceptance metrics, and even the time and energy spent on building AI tools rather than things that would actually improve product quality - these are all in service of the same ideology.

The AI industry, and those who push AI tools are fundamentally uninterested in making your work better or leaving you in control of your work. They are telling you this directly through both words and actions. I think ignoring that is a stunning level of naïvete.

#noAI