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It\u2019s been a big week for AI boosters. There is, of course, a very good chance that this opening sentence would be true if you\u2019d read it at any point in the past few years, since \u201ccompiling a weekly list of AI news items\u201d is truly, to use journalistic parlance, a piece of piss.<\/p>\n
The AI Impact Summit landed in New Delhi, as Narendra Modhi welcomed thousands of soberly-suited futurists like George Osborne, who told us the UK\u00a0would be \u201cleft behind if it doesn\u2019t embrace AI\u201d<\/a>, and Rishi Sunak, who delivered a keynote entitled\u00a0\u201cAI Will Improve Your Life<\/a>\u201c. One might connect such enthusiasm to their newly minted jobs with OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively, but we are bidden to banish such cynicism from our minds.<\/p>\n At home, Keir Starmer launched a nebulous campaign to\u00a0clamp down on AI chatbots<\/a>, a note of caution which might have seemed more reasonable,\u00a0had his science minister Liz Kendall not spent the past few weeks\u00a0pumping AI guff<\/a>\u00a0 from government websites. Outside of the political realm, we\u2019ve seen AI\u2019s\u00a0data centre usage spell doom for almost all consumer electronics<\/a>, Microsoft admit that its Copilot AI (which nobody on Earth is using<\/a>) accessed sensitive email data<\/a>, and the entire web\u00a0melt down over a \u201cHollywood-destroying\u201d video-creator<\/a>\u00a0which has\u00a0subsequently been exposed as a face-replace fake<\/a>, and\u2026 well, I think even the most patient reader\u2019s tolerance for links-within-a-single article will reach its limits if I go much further than that.\u00a0<\/p>\n If the tone of the above hasn\u2019t given it away, I will own up to being a sceptic. I do, in fact, abhor AI hype with a vehemence that has become increasingly fanatical. As someone who\u00a0sees it as a bubble perched upon a pyramid, I intuit clear signs that AI, while currently doing immense harm, is also bad at a large percentage of the things it claims to be good at, with no credible path toward doing one tenth of the things its boosters say it will in future, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either sorely misinformed by people who should know better, or is themselves a financially compromised grifter, a disqualifyingly credulous rube, or both.<\/p>\n Subscribe to the New Statesman today for only \u00a31 a week.<\/p>\n To be clear, there\u2019d be much to hate about AI even if I didn\u2019t think its hype represented a world-shattering bubble. I\u2019d still abhor its near-perfect utility for generating scams, predatory chatbots, schizophrenia-enabling LLMs, non-consensual nudes and child sexual abuse material, or its proven harms in defence or governmental applications, which have seen algorithms directing everything from missile targeting systems to benefit claim databases, roles with devastating, life-or-death consequences, and zero human accountability.\u00a0<\/p>\n I could slap on a pair of wellies and walk you through the immense environmental impacts caused by server farms from Georgia to Galway to Guizhou, or focus on its social demerits, its proficiency in spreading dangerous misinformation, its wholesale and profligate looting of artists\u2019 work, the removal of humanity and usability from the services, websites and search engines we use every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n I could get on my cultural high horse and rail against the horrifying inanity of its content, on the bloodless, chirpy miasma of false, PR-inflected slop that it barfs into our feeds every single day, on its credulity-mining of the isolated and vulnerable, on its grisly exploitation of our reanimated dead. I might even list its more mundane drawbacks, the sheer head-smacking frustration it prompts us all any time we open a website or document, or view any statement, image or video online.\u00a0<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
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