On the Uses and Abuses of Artificial Intelligence

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.