Advertisements like the one seen above have appeared all over my neighborhood in San Francisco, and if their goal is to make people seethe with anger every day, mission accomplished.
The AI revolution heralded by countless billboards across San Francisco only make visible the tension felt in invisible ways by those of us in the trenches, watching helplessly as the bots come for us quicker and quicker, nipping at our heels. Like many people, I initially greeted the arrival of artificial intelligence with cautious optimism. If it helps with certain tasks, sure, it can be a boon to human progress. But is it progress? Is it an aid to accessing human knowledge, or a shortcut to critical thinking? Does it make the world’s art and literature more accessible to all, or does it engage in blatant theft of the art and literature that has been used to feed the hungry AI beasts? I fear it’s the latter. And they’re not just hungry, they’re thirsty. Just look at the dire environmental impacts of training insatiable LLMs (large language models).
The desire to AI use everywhere needs to be tempered with the need to respect that we live in a world filled with people. We are people, not just generators of efficiency! We want to do meaningful work with and for other people. I remember what it was like to be a young professional looking for my first big break in the working world. If I saw that there was no entry point for humans, just bots that look like pretty, young white women (the issue of race and AI is best left for another essay), I’d be discouraged. If I were a creative person, whether a designer, an artist, or even a writer, I’d be very discouraged. Paying people who make art, who write books and essays and articles, who compose the music that mark our days? It’s just not cost-effective.
The Lebanexican 