disparate thoughts on ai

some disparate thoughts on ai in no particular order and subject to perpetual revision:

• opting out of ai or not using ai¹ is like trying to opt out of electricity when it was invented. this is not a value judgement but a claim about the state of the world
• in general, ai only produces slop and will likely continue to produce slop for the foreseeable future
  • defenders of ai (slop) have a vested interest in a future with less ai slop
• ai, like any technology, improves through iterative processes and refinement², and this (probably necessarily) requires a collective suffering through its current iteration
  • 'it's bad today, but it'll be so good tomorrow' is the neoliberalism's perpetually deferred promise that promotes contemporary suffering in service of an unevenly distributed dystopian future
• ai is unlikely to replace any meaningful work, so long as the work is described and understood as meaningful
  • this is a massive problem given how much work (and life) has been rendered meaningless³
  • 'useful' is the other word we could use here, especially given how we understand 'use' under capitalism
• all technology (broadly considered) has revolutionary potential, but it's potential and who/what directs that technology and benefits from it are unevenly and unequally distributed
  • what parts of luddism are worth hewing to or insisting on?
• we would do well to examine and reconsider the language with which we 'instruct' ai and communicate with it
  • ex. what do we learn from reading agent instructions not so much as machinic input but as language qua language
  • perhaps it's time to really revisit deleuze, but that's just me
• while thinking is surely altered by ai and its use, the moral panic about becoming somehow 'less human'⁴ by using it should be met with intense skepticism
• there is an active need to rethink both intelligence and cognition as they are used to describe ai and how disparate entities (again, broadly considered) possess either
  • see much work done in any kind of posthumanist or deconstructive thinking
• do our everyday, banal activities benefit significantly enough from ai to justify its cost?
  • what does this question enumerate or force us to enumerate in our attempt to answer?