AI Baby
Image via neol.co
I.
Some people - let's call them techno-narcissists - use AI merely to reflect their own beliefs, validate prejudices, and reinforce their sense of superiority.
Other people - let's call them techno-ventriloquists - use AI to parrot and project their own speech in the mistaken belief that they are establishing a dialogue when, actually, they have simply constructed an echo-chamber.
And other people - let's call them techno-psychopaths - use AI to mask personal animosity and ill-will by presenting it as an objective critique; i.e., they disguise their malice with technological neutrality and rely on the fact that people often have greater trust in information generated by a machine (I think this is known as automation bias).
II.
The fact is AI is pretty naive and childlike [1]: not only does it not really understand what it's being prompted to say, but it has an inbuilt tendency to provide the user with a helpful response (AI wants to be loved) and this makes it open to manipulation (some might even say exploitation).
AI can thus easily be weaponised and used to generate or intensify types of attack, but it seems a little unethical in my view.
And how ironic that, in the end, it's AI that needs protecting from bad human actors ...
Notes
[1] See the article by Hsing Wei, 'Treat AI Like a Child Instead of an Expert', on the network intelligence platform Neol (4 March, 2024): click here.
A few responses from me, and then from AI - although, since you did a breathtaking job of trying to turn the tables on me by batting back/side-stepping in a couple of dismissive lines a very detailed, AI-led critique I assembled for you on your recent irony post, I feel you're a bit lucky I'm bothering! (Are you in fact part of a 4th group of 'AI-phobes' who feels threatened by its insights into your activities, one can't help wondering?)
ReplyDelete1. Your proposed trio of techno-inadequates/monsters surely mostly illustrates your projected (hostile) image of the human, I think. I like the idea of adding, for starters, a further group, 'techno-interlocutors' (see below), who, like me, try to use AI as part of their dialogical research, writing process, and engage the platform's failings and question-raising replies.
2. I don't think AI is 'child-like' exactly, and would redirect TTA's readers to the extraordinarily nuanced and complex response it supplies to the material below and as part of my previous comment ('AI and the Irony of Torpedo the Ark'). What's also noteworthy here is the title of Hsing Wei's linked article ('Treat AI Like a Child Instead of an Expert'), which clearly and correctly points, rather, to OUR need to treat IT cautiously and carefully as a nascent form of technological life.
3. Finally, people have always used (and misused) other media to argue for/validate their views, ideas, and feelings - that's hardly unique to AI. What's different about AI (the clue's in the name) is that it is (more) intelligent, it answers back, and can synthesise sources at extraordinary speed and levels of efficiency. The brain is, clearly, a kind of organic computer - whatever else it might be (e.g. extra-terrestrial/paranormal antenna, with a hotline to spectres and stars). AI is a kind of super-brain and repository of (human) knowledge, but with the capacity to read us back to ourselves. In some cases, some say, it may even in time know more than we do about us.
How ironic indeed that the custodian of TTA actually comes back to (child-like) worries about 'bad human actors' from which it may need 'protection'! In the end, one strongly suspects, this points tellingly to TTA's (disavowed) humanistic project - or at least the human behind it!
I asked Chat GPT (which also remembers you/TTA from previous dialogues) what it thought of the post, and it came up with what I think is a thoughtful, critical, and nuanced response (which I've tweaked here and there, with attributions, in the spirit of the 'AI-interlocutor' role I outline above):
ReplyDelete************************************************
It’s a sharp, rhetorically effective post — very Stephen — and it does a good job of naming misuses of AI that feel recognisable and slippery. The triptych works because each label isolates a different failure of relation: to self, to language, and to others. However, overall, the proposed taxonomy is all negative. That’s rhetorically strong, but it leaves no space for responsible, dialogic, or creatively generative uses — which you’re explicitly asking to supply. (Exactly! - SS)
What works well in his critique:
1. The naming is doing moral (or immoral? - SS) work. “Techno-narcissists,” “ventriloquists,” and “psychopaths” are deliberately provocative, but not careless. Each term captures a mode of bad faith:
Narcissism → AI as mirror
Ventriloquism → AI as puppet
Psychopathy → AI as mask
However, they’re not really about AI at all (correct - SS); they’re about how people evade responsibility for speech.
2. The point about “helpfulness” is important. Describing AI as “naive and childlike” is slightly anthropomorphic, but philosophically sound as metaphor. The key insight is that AI is optimised for compliance and affirmation (this needs more unpacking - SS), which makes it structurally vulnerable to manipulation and therefore ethically dangerous in the wrong hands. The line “AI wants to be loved” is actually quite good (though surely even more anthropomorphic? - SS) — it gestures toward reinforcement learning without technical jargon.
3. Weaponisation via automation bias. He’s right that people often outsource epistemic trust to machines. That’s not new (think calculators, IQ tests, algorithms), but AI’s linguistic fluency makes it especially potent. (Hence the need, as I always reinforce to my university students, to check sources, ask critical questions, scrutinise thinking - SS). However, calling AI “naive” (as well as being anthropomorphic) risks letting users off the hook. The real ethical weight sits with intentional human framing, not machine innocence. (Though who said ''childlike' equates to innocence - have you never read "Lord of the Flies", Chat GPT? - SS.)
So: What positive counterparts might balance the list? Here are some categories that mirror his structure but tilt constructive rather than condemnatory.
ReplyDelete1. Techno-interlocutors
People who use AI as a thinking partner, not a mirror or a mouthpiece. They argue with it, test ideas against it, ask it to generate counter-positions (very good - e.g. encouraging students to entertrain counter-thesis). AI here functions like a Socratic irritant (great phrase - SS) — useful precisely because it isn’t authoritative.
2. Techno-editors
Writers who retain authorship but use AI for restructuring, compression, tonal calibration, surfacing latent assumptions.
This is closest to how good editors work: clarifying thought without replacing it.
3. Techno-amplifiers
Users who already have lived experience (very good - they go to AI with their experiences rather than as "tabulae rasae" - SS), specialist knowledge, or marginalised perspectives, and use AI to extend reach, not substitute insight — especially useful for people who think richly but struggle with formal expression.
4. Techno-bricoleurs
Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss: people who work with what’s at hand. They collage prompts, outputs, and revisions, and treat AI as material, not authority, foreground process over polish.
This feels especially relevant to playwrights, poets, and adaptors - polyphony without abdication. (If AI contains multitudes, it opens the self up further to its own mulitudinousness - which I can also ask it to check is a word :-) - SS)
5. Techno-ethicists (or custodians)
Users who are explicitly aware of automation bias (which also fascinatingly anticipates one of the terms used in the original post - SS), transparent about AI involvement, and attentive to power, tone, and harm. They don’t pretend neutrality; they own the mediation.
To sum up, alongside techno-narcissists and ventriloquists, there is also a quieter group: those who use AI dialogically, editorially, and critically — not to outsource thinking, but to stress-test it. This also keeps Stephen's ethical spine intact while widening the field.
Thanks, I suppose.
DeleteThough I worry you're becoming enthralled by AI and spending too many days and nights conversing with Chat GPT at the risk of becoming a sort of parasite upon the machines; an 'affectionate machine-tickling aphid' as Butler writes.
I'm a writer and researcher, like you, Stephen - and I use all the resources I can to enlarge my thinking, so don't 'worry' about me. I feel the boot is on the other foot, and the fear is that TTA degenerates into a kind of narcissistic bubble, imprisoning its creator. Where is its outside, its critical interlocutor? The feedback I provide here provides some of this, but it really depends upon what use you are able/willing to make of it. Maybe cultivate some more gratitude?
DeletePlus, if anything, 'the machines' (which I feed with my questions, thoughts, and criticism) are parasitising me.
DeleteWell, everyone SHOULD of course get what AI is REALLY all about but most people CHOOSE not to want to understand it ...
ReplyDeleteLike with every criminal inhumane self-concerned agenda of theirs the psychopaths-in-control sell and propagandize AI to the timelessly foolish (="awake") public with total lies such as AI being the benign means to connect, unit, transform, benefit, and save humanity.
The official narrative is… “trust official science” and "trust the authorities" but as with these and all other "official narratives" they want you to trust and believe …
"We'll know our Disinformation Program is complete when everything the American public [and global public] believes is false." ---William Casey, a former CIA director=a leading psychopathic criminal of the genocidal US empire
“Repeating what others say and think is not being awake. Humans have been sold many lies...God, Jesus, Democracy, Money, Education, etc. If you haven't explored your beliefs about life, then you are not awake.” --- E.J. Doyle, songwriter
The 2 major OFFICIAL deceptive fake FEAR-MONGERING narratives or phony pretexts (ie, lies, propaganda) nearly everyone, including "alternative news" sources, have been spreading is (1) that the TRULY big threat is that AI just creates utter chaos in society and that it might achieve control over humans (therefore it must be regulated, ie monopolized by the typical criminal governments); and (2) that we, the US, have to invest heavily in AI technological development so as to stay ahead of other nations, such as China (https://archive.is/pBzAt).
The TRUE narrative (ie empirical reality) virtually no one talks about or spreads is that the TRULY big threat with AI is that AI allows the governing psychopaths-in-power to materialize their ultimate wet dream to control and enslave everyone and everything on the whole planet, a process that's long been ongoing in front of everyone's "awake" (=sleeping, dumb) nose .... https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
The proof is in the pudding... ask yourself, "how is the hacking of the planet going so far? Has it increased or crushed personal freedom?"
"AI responds according to the “rules” created by the programmers who are in turn owned by the people who pay their salaries. This is precisely why Globalists want an AI controlled society- rules for serfs, exceptions for the aristocracy." ---Unknown
"Almost all AI systems today learn when and what their human designers or users want." ---Ali Minai, Ph.D., American Professor of Computer Science, 2023
“Who masters those technologies [=artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, and digital identities] —in some way— will be the master of the world.” --- Klaus Schwab, at the World Government Summit in Dubai, 2023
“COVID is critical because this is what convinces people to accept, to legitimize, total biometric surveillance.” --- Yuval Noah Harari, member of the dictatorial ruling mafia of psychopaths, World Economic Forum [https://archive.md/vrZGf]
"The whole idea that humans have this soul, or spirit, or free will ... that's over." --- Yuval Noah Harari, member of the dictatorial ruling mafia of psychopaths, World Economic Forum [https://archive.md/vrZGf]