ghost in the machine

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.

has anyone seen my egg