Related Recs

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Thinking about The purpose of AI

Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.

@theclack

Mar 24, 2024

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Anti-Rec: AI

Boo I hate the outsourcing of labour! Was reading an essay/talk from Stephen Fry and wanted to share “We have long been used to thinking of technology as being ethically neutral, lacking moral valency. The same press can print Shakespeare’s sonnets one day and Hitler’s Mein Kampf the next. The devices are not capable of making decisions, either aesthetic, ethical or political. The NRA likes to say the same thing about guns. Ai however is different. Intelligence is all about decision making. That’s what separates it from automated, mechanically determined outcomes. That’s what separates a river from a canal. A canal must go where we tell it. A river is led by nothing but gravity and if that means flooding a town, tough on the town. Ai’s gravity is its goals. Unsupervised machine learning allows for unsupervised machines — and for the independent agents that flow from them.„

@missmisery

Mar 10, 2025

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write to brian merchant about how ai is killing your job

One of my favorite tech journalists is fielding messages about the effect AI has had on peoples' jobs. He recently wrote about Duolingo's shift to AI over humans, and it got enough feedback for him to start a whole new series on how this tech is creeping into every industry in damaging ways. Check out the link! (@TORTITUDE Your post got me thinking about this!)

@theclack

May 10, 2025

Top Recs from @pratibha

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we all come back to ourselves eventually

the comfort in the ebb and flow, the cyclical nature of it all

@pratibha

Mar 5, 2024

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digitally bumping into each other in earnest

it's like.... kind of insane that we (not me, of course) made the internet to be any other way. imagine if the real world were algorithmic... how kooky would that be?? you'd only ever talk to people who've already gotten a thumbs up from 10,000 other people that they're cool and worthy of being heard and it would be super weird and parasocial bc everybody else would be trying to get their attention too. and maybe you'd only be able to see people like in that episode of Black Mirror w Jon Hamm where some ppl are crystal clear in color and others are blurred out and grey and inaccessible to you. well, that's what an algorithmic internet feels like!!!! and it's terrible! i like being able to post on here whenever a thought softly lands in my head and know whoever happens to refresh their page or hop onto the app when i hit SHARE will be able to see it right away... it's the beauty of your words being seen at the right time with no filters or algorithms shoving u into a corner.....and being able to see others in the same way <3

@pratibha

Feb 6, 2024

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the peace found in not encapsulating the moon

i love that our seemingly high-tech phones still cannot do the job of capturing the moon‘s ethereal essence. it’s so humbling and vulnerable to attempt to take a photo of her and have it come out all ugly and orb-like. it’s literally none of ur business to see what she looks like anytime apart from the present moment! (and please don’t tell me if samsung or google pixel have invented technology to do a better job of this. it wouldn’t sit right with me… like trying to sneakily undress a woman without her consent when she has explicitly stated she’d rather remain demurely clothed and mysterious)

@pratibha

Mar 17, 2024