THREAD
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I’ve gotten quite a few messages from disabled people who benefit from AI in the same way I do but feel unable to admit to it because they are scared of backlash.
I will start by saying I understand concerns about AI, they are real. AI is energy intensive, data centres use water, a resource that is already scarce in many places, and the companies behind these products are unethical in so many ways.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
@sknob I will pardon the pun.
It's a pretty good comparison. Look into the issues that air travel causes globally including what the travel industry does socially, politically, psychologically etc. It's just as vast.
When you take it apart, every huge capitalist industry looks a lot like AI does on the inside.
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Flying produces vast carbon emissions and non CO₂ warming effects, it's protected by fuel subsidies and tax exemptions, and drives airport expansion that destroys land and communities. Travel economies hollow out cities price residents out of housing, displace local businesses, and replace lived cultures with tourist monocultures designed for consumption.
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Entire regions become dependent on precarious hospitality labour (so bad in Scotland!) while public funds are diverted to support private airlines and infrastructure that mostly benefits the mobile and affluent. The industry is also incredibly entangled with sexual and gendered harm, from the expansion of sex tourism and trafficking to the normalisation of entitlement, racialised desire, and violence in destination economies.
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Itt also props up authoritarian regimes under the banner of economic development. Psychologically, travel is sold as self actualisation and freedom, encouraging constant movement, novelty addiction, and escape rather than stability or repair, while politically it reproduces colonialist logic in which some bodies move freely across borders and others are immobilised or criminalised. And that's just to start...
@kristiedegaris I understand how GenAI can be marginally useful in some situations and how it can help people who come to rely on them, but I fail to understand how that makes that use case ethical. I understand the appeal, the need even, but that doesn’t make it ethical in my view.
If I think killing animals for food is unethical and my doctor orders me to eat meat for medical reasons and I do so, I will still consider that killing animals for food is unethical while I eat my steak.
@kristiedegaris OK, then we agree on that 😅
I don’t know, it doesn’t seem weird to me to say that I understand perfectly why you would use it for the reasons you described, and at the same time to think there’s no ethical use of these technologies given how damaging they are on so many levels. These two things can be true at the same time, and we are all forced into these types of contradictions given the system we live in, and we do the best we can do.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but I feel like today is a good time to revisit the concept of “Vegan + bacon”. People often avoid making small positive changes because they get caught up in trying to go all the way. For example, “I could never go vegan. I love bacon too much”. So then go vegan plus bacon. Or vegetarian plus bacon. Or just switch to oat milk and eat more vegetables. Whatever small change you can make is good
@kristiedegaris @sknob
I have nothing to contribute to this argument, but I just wanted to chime in with my appreciation to both of you for your respectful and thoughtful expression of disagreement about something important. (And for finding partial agreement where you can, which is also important.)
This is refreshing after so many years of Twitter-style posing about how anyone who does or says XYZ is bad and must be shunned.
@sknob @kristiedegaris thanks for taking this discussion out in the open, I found it a good and thought provoking read.
There are bad actors in all industries, AI is no different. Still AI has been around for years in many different forms, and we don’t always see where the use relates to us - it’s not all LLMs.
What we see now is big LLM companies, forcing development with an unethical approach, being normalized by a variety of actors, included in products most people use.
Kristie
sknob
David McMullin
Morten Mosgaard