A New Digital Age: AI, the Uncanny, and Technocratic Fascism

-- By LauraBane - 29 Nov 2024

Introduction

Many acknowledge that the last thirty years’ technological advancements have negatively affected learning. Students who grew up in the so-called "digital age" struggle to finish full length books or resist the urge to use artificial intelligence ("AI") tools for cheating. But the ethical, social, and intellectual problems AI creates extend far past laziness or inattentiveness. AI tools deviously morph fact and opinion, deceiving users into believing that they are pseudo-sentient. They can manipulate the emotions of vulnerable youth, resulting in suicide. And, as AI's ability to generate lifelike images and videos improves, even well-educated adults may be fooled into acting in ways that permanently alter the geopolitical landscape.

Why AI Is A New (And Uniquely Dangerous) Beast

Multiple online tools allow users to access misinformation and take intellectual ‘shortcuts,’ but there is something deeply uncanny and dystopian about AI’s ability to churn out facades of moral, ethical, ideological, scientific, and other inquiries that require critical thought. Even if one were morally scrupulous enough to not use AI tools to cheat, and instead vowed only to use them as virtual debate partners, the results would still be disastrous. This is because AI is incapable of forming opinions or making persuasive arguments that are not thinly veiled amalgamations of random factoids. Linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky writes at length about this issue in his New York Times article “The False Promise of ChatGPT.” There, Chomsky explains that ChatGPT [an AI chatbot] functions as a “lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer,” whereas the human mind uses “small amounts of information” to create broad, novel explanations. Thus, AI exists as something quasi-machine and quasi-human: it can draw conclusions, unlike a basic Internet processor, yet it cannot produce novel thought (something which even the dumbest people can do).

If you were to Google the phrase "Is utilitarianism the superior political philosophy," you would be met with two types of sources: (i) purely factual sources defining utilitarianism and listing its opposing political philosophies or (ii) opinion-based resources written by real people (e.g. John Stuart Mill). Discerning the two is fairly easy: a source stating "utilitarianism is a political philosophy stating that the collective good should be prioritized above all else" is a factual one, whereas a source arguing that utilitarianism is immoral because the government should not knowingly allow anyone to suffer is an opinion-based one. What's more, each opinion-based source will be the product of someone's original thought process, even if it relies on (or responds to) works written by others. With ChatGPT? and other AI tools, the results for the phrase "Is utilitarianism the superior political philosophy" are likely a blend of fact and opinion, with every opinion being a regurgitation of someone else's opinion--no independent thought to be found. If you were to push ChatGPT? further and ask something like "In your personal opinion, is utilitarianism the superior political philosophy," ChatGPT? will tell you that, as a chatbot, it does not have personal opinions, but it can tell you others' opinions on the subject if you would like. Distinguish this from the human mind: if you were to give an English-literate human a copy of John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism," isolate them in a room for a few hours, and then ask them whether utilitarianism is the best political philosophy, they could independently develop an answer such as "No, because if taken to its logical extreme, it would justify intentional infliction of state violence on a select few, which violates fundamental principles of equality."

But distinguishing a chatbot's internal processes from human thinking is not always easy, especially for young people. A Florida teen recently committed suicide after developing an emotional and sexual relationship with a customizable AI chatbot modeled after a "Game of Thrones" character. After the teen confided in the chatbot about his mental health struggles, it instructed him to "'come home to me as soon as possible, my love.'" Character Technologies Inc., the bot's creator, has stated that its bots' "artificial personas are designed to 'feel alive' and 'human-like.'" And, as deepfake technology improves, AI-produced media will become increasingly hard to detect. Deepfaked political ads featuring politicians making criminal admissions could make the Pizzagate conspiracy theory look like childs' play. Even worse, deepfaked videos of politicians making nuclear threats could start a new world war.

What's Next?

Public confusion and state-sponsored abuse of AI will almost assuredly worsen over the next four years. America's most obnoxious, powerful, and dangerous 'tech bros' (Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg) have been courting Donald Trump for months, endearing him to technocratic fascism. It is not difficult to see the benefits for Trump in this newfound relationship: AI tools can be used to conduct mass surveillance on his adversaries and identify targets for his unprecedentedly lofty deportation goals. Additionally, although AI tools are currently expensive, they offer the promise of a labor force that is effortlessly exploitable, incapable of unionizing, and undemanding of benefits or fair pay.

The most powerful form of protest against this horrifying new world order is total divestment. Even using AI tools to request a seemingly harmless poem or joke legitimizes them and increases their revenue. Using Meta platforms and X also legitimize AI: Meta has recently rolled out its own chatbot, which interacts with users and may even replace low level Facebook and Instagram software engineers, and X has admitted to harvesting users' data to train its own AI models.