The Gist
- AI ethics crisis. AI is not just a technology issue but an ethics crisis, driven by a culture of manipulation, greed and deceit in Big Tech.
- Growth at all costs. The relentless pursuit of growth fuels unethical AI practices, prioritizing profit over societal well-being and transparency.
- Manipulative marketing tactics. Modern AI excels at exploiting human vulnerabilities, transforming advertising into a powerful tool for deception.
Morals, ethics and character matter. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters, creating an AI ethics crisis.
AI is the latest fad like bitcoin or blockchain. It is the latest way in which scammers, con artists and grifters think they can grift, scam and con. It is the latest magnet for the speedy and the greedy.
This doesn’t mean that deep within AI, there aren’t profoundly important developments that have the capacity to radically reshape society and our environment for the better. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t many wonderful scientists and developers working on AI.
It means that the people who matter — the people who make the decisions — are generally scammers, con artists and ruthless grifters. Bad characters operating with a bad model will create bad software that creates a bad society.
Exposing the AI Ethics Crisis: Manipulation and Moral Decay in Tech
Modern AI is advertising. It is born out of the great advertising minds in Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Advertising has always been about lying and targeting vulnerable people, as well as targeting the vulnerabilities of everyone else. It is constantly probing for our weaknesses.
As one marketer once boasted to me: “The best marketing is when I make you buy something and you don’t even know why.” AI truly excels at this sort of manipulation. Freed from having to be truthful, it can search through millions of combinations of words or images to find the exact right combination that triggers a buying reaction from you. The truth for AI is the sale, the conversion or the convert, whether it’s selling a politician or a fake skin cream.
Over the years, I have met many people behind advertising strategies. They have no problem with what they do. In fact, they think it’s the right thing to do — moving power and money from a sucker who doesn’t deserve to have it because they are a sucker, and giving that money and power to smarter, stronger people.
Related Article: The Efficiency Scam From AI and Big Tech
Growth at All Costs: Fueling the AI Ethics Crisis
Many of the worst practices come back to the voracious need for fast growth and for ever greater acceleration. We can bring almost all wrongs back to the door of the Growth Death Cult, and within the halls of mirrors of the Growth Death Cult we will find the priests of eugenics whispering their mantras of godliness.
As Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres wrote for First Monday, “Many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI [Artificial General Intelligence], resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of ‘safety’ and ‘benefiting humanity’ to evade accountability.”
It has often been left to women of color like Gebru to stand in front of the unstoppable train. Her Mastodon profile states that she was “fired from Google for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace and writing about the dangers of large language models.” Addressing the AI ethics crisis requires a fundamental change in values.
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