Today's generative artificial intelligence market benefits from the really seductive stories its founders have been able to tell and spread. And those of us who are most impacted by the consequences of their stories can't turn the tides by just being against them.
We need a better story.
Current arguments against generative artificial intelligence seems to start and stop at just that: being against generative artificial intelligence. The arguments are sound: it's bad for the environment; it's built on stolen human labor; it homogenizes knowledge by averaging the statistically next token; it amplifies already-existing vectors of harm in our societies; and so on.
By contrast, the stories for generative artificial intelligence are superlative in nearly every direction. It will eliminate your job. It will produce the first solo-founded billionaire companies. It will facilitate the next great transfer of wealth; if you don't get on board, you will get left behind. And, again, so on and so forth.
Now, I am fully anti generative artificial intelligence, but not for the reasons that most people are. You see, I occupy the liminal space between the super nerdy hacker who geeks about the latest hardware and software advancements, and the voraciously introverted bookworkmwho devours books, blogs, poems, and social media streams as fast as I can turn the page or refresh the screen.
This means that while I can and do design software systems to automate and scale data-driven ecommerce empires, I also know that that data doesn't get made without a compelling story to lubricate the cash transactions from customer to corporation.
Humans are motivated by stories. Everything in our society thrives on latent and intrinsic stories of who we are and where we fit in the world. Our lives are expanded and limited by those stories, whether we know them or not. If we want to escape the thrall that the purveyors of generative artificial intelligence have seemingly put entire world institutions under, we need a better story.
So what is a story that eclipses the ones these Big Tech capital and resource hoarders are trying to push down our throats? What story will facilitate the equitable distribution of resources and capital? Does there exist a different path to the singularity these founders are heedlessly chasing?
I have some ideas, but what about you? What stories can you come up with?