2/

But something feels off in how this debate is being handled. We live inside unethical systems constantly. That is our baseline as humans in the 21st century.

3/

The aviation industry is a good example It is hugely environmentally destructive, and bound to inequality (only 10 - 11% of the world's population takes a flight in any given year, with only about 2 - 4% traveling internationally annually. Despite high passenger numbers, an estimated 80% of the global population has never flown in an airplane!) and yet we don’t generally judge people for flying. In fact travel has come to be seen as so essential that we don’t really put limits on it at all

4/

I’m sure you would all agree however that there are ways to be an ethical user of this incredibly unethical industry? I think AI should be treated the same way.

5/

Collapsing all AI use into one immoral category doesn’t make sense to me. Frivolously chatting to it all day, repeatedly generating images for fun, or asking it to write your book is not the same as asking AI to help navigate the labour and bureaucracy of disability, or the pressures of other forms of inequality.

6/

For me the distinction is between creative and functional work. I don’t want AI to be part of the process of my creative work, but AI being involved in the functional work of managing my disability frees up space for the creative work which feels integral to my happy existence as a human being.

7/

For a bit of context, a return flight from Scotland to Spain uses roughly the same amount of energy as hundreds of thousands of substantial text only AI interactions. That’s a lifetime’s worth of pretty heavy AI use. Something, somewhere in our thinking has gotten skewed. This is not to advocate for, or excuse excessive AI use, it's to ask that judgement is proportional and accurate.

8/

I understand that drawing these stark moral lines feels very clean and very clear but I think that it can often end up protecting harmful existing heirarchies.

9/

I’m not aguing for a ‘fuck it’ attitude to AI use, not at all. We need to approach this powerful technology in a considered and careful way. It needs to be heavily regulated at the policy end too. What I’m asking people to see is that it is possible act ethically within an unethical system (there are exampels everywhere!) and that if we care about ethics we must make sure that our judgement is ethical too.

END

@kristiedegaris I really appreciate this thoughtful point of view.

I don’t have answers. But I do see that “AI” can mean many things (technologies, use cases) and some are more grossly exploitative than others, and some feel more ethical than others.

I am generally anti-AI myself 😁, but probably much more anti-flying, so I liked your counterexample.

The case of navigating and managing disabilities… well in my household there have been moments when AI-adjacent tools have been incredibly helpful in distilling the insane amount of bureaucracy one has to cut through. It doesn’t eliminate the bureaucracy but it did give us useful pointers of what to do next. Could we have accomplished the same thing without those tools? Yes but with more spoons and a lot more time; we already spend an overwhelming amount of our time and energy on navigating these helpful but very flawed systems.

AI as assistive tech, then, feels less gross to me, maybe even ethical.