I’ve been quiet lately, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have too much to say and don’t know where to begin. Even this post has morphed into something so unwieldly, I’m making it two parts. Unlike a lot of writers, I’m not worried about generative AI replacing me. It’s not even an adequate replacement for scripted customer service, nor is it intended to be. Otherwise, yelling “real person” into our phones wouldn’t be such a universal experience.
Anyway, here’s Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, saying the quiet part out loud in defense of AI’s energy usage.
But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.
Humans, such a drag – am I right?
I mean, this particular human, yeah, absolutely. Minimizing our existence “and whatever” in defense of AI is wild. Some people think he’s smart because he has a lot of money to throw at smarter people – until he has no more use for them – but I suspect his IQ (a questionable measurement of intelligence) isn’t any higher than his EQ. Here’s an embarrassing admission:
I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT. Clearly, people did it for a long time — no problem. But I have relied on it so much.
He inadvertently demonstrated the negative impact that excessive use of LLMs (language learning models) has on cognition (1, 2). If you don’t use it, you lose it. Even the chatbots have exhibited cognitive decline. A lot of fan boys favorably equate AI to cars, but the comparison is apt precisely due to similar negative consequences. Not only do cars consume a lot of energy and produce a lot of pollution, they also contribute to sedentary lifestyles, and, consequently, physical decline. I appreciate the independence cars provide, but I don’t miss daily hour long commutes and I wish public transportation in the US didn’t lag behind countries like Japan. I have yet to see as much benefit from AI. I want a high speed railway, not self driving cars; also, better bike infrastructure and nature restoration efforts that make drivers, cyclists, and wildlife safer, and negate some of the environmental harm.
As I’ve said before, technology that helps people connect is great. Instead LLMs break not only neural connections, but our connections with each other. Which leads me to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta. If Meta isn’t offering to replace my posts with generic influencer speak, it’s auto-populating inane messages when I try to share events (one of its few remaining uses). There’s socially awkward, and then there’s whatever Zuckerberg suffers that makes him think we need AI to talk to loved ones. He limits who we see because we’d be “overwhelmed” by content, but floods our feed with unwanted content instead. I block so many weird or rage-bait-y pages just for similar pages to show up again later, and I still have to check the feeds of people I want to see no matter how much I interact with them. It’s okay, though. After all the complaining, Zuckerberg finally has the solution to our feelings of disconnect. Will he reverse course so we can reconnect?
Going forward, I think one of the interesting questions is, “How does AI fit into that?”. There’s an interesting sociological finding that the average American has fewer than three friends and the average American would like to have more than three friends.
Oh.
Some people want AI relationships for the same reason a company has been trying to promote an AI actress. AI will never age, never challenge you, never deny you, and never press charges. However, it may talk you into hurting yourself or someone else. As beloved author Terry Pratchett so often reminded us, sin begins with treating people like things.
AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not — they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole…AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation than be reactive.
That was Elon Musk in 2017, but something changed. When he wasn’t gutting essential services or stealing data with his army of dead-eyed acolytes after investing $288 million in the 2024 election, Musk charged full speed ahead with AI on X. The chatbot Grok allows people to generate illicit content using photos of women without consent, and even children. Musk locked Spicy Grok behind a paywall and made jokes. Despite company claims to the contrary, Grok still generates violating content.
The self-proclaimed free speech absolutionist allows antisemitism and other hate speech (1, 2) but bans his critics. And now he, along with the current administration, claims regulating AI violates free speech.
