We’re Already at Risk of Ceding Our Humanity to AI
February 12, 2025 at 01:00AMIn the race to employ AI everywhere and anywhere in a bid to generate higher profits, why are so few focused on what it will cost us as creative human beings? Where will we be as humans when art is completely reduced to algorithm-generated content? When the bots take over, what will human rights look like? In an excerpt of her book, Humans: A Monstrous History, Surekha Davies considers the efficiencies and progress AI breakthroughs can deliver for humanity, provided our humanity isn’t a casualty along the way.
The world of creators is just one arena in which machines are reconfiguring definitions of the human, as we’ll see. The rhetoric from Silicon Valley is of “saving humanity.” But far from saving anyone, creating and “training” LLMs has become another way to exploit people. These companies are hiring, for a pittance, remote gig workers in the Global South as content moderators to “train” racial bias and harmful language out of LLMs, exposing workers to horrific racist and sexist content in the process. In 2023 moderators based in Kenya called for a government investigation into the trauma caused by moderating OpenAI’s ChatGPT content.
To be sure, there are global problems that are so urgent and severe that we should explore every avenue, including AI, to solve them. Key among them is the climate emergency. And in medicine there are things that AI (with proper guardrails) can do to extend and enhance the work of people and to save or improve lives. But how we think about and legislate corporations that develop AI and claim to own our data will determine the future of the idea of “human” and what “human rights” will mean.
More picks on artificial intelligence
AI Is a Lot of Work
“When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.”
Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?
“There is no doubt that some forms of creativity are within the reach, and indeed the grasp, of computer programs.”
The Teens Making Friends with AI Chatbots
“But Hawk still finds it easier to chat with character.ai bots than real people.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/11/were-already-at-risk-of-ceding-our-humanity-to-ai/
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