AI optimism is a class privilege

AI optimism is a class privilege

A while back, in a slightly earlier era of AI , a project was making the rounds which would read your GitHub profile, and create a personalized roast based on the contents.

It was intended, I assume, as a harmless, lighthearted novelty. I wanted to join in on the fun, so I put my profile in and tried it out.

I didn’t laugh at my roast.

It wasn’t clever, or funny, or even particularly unexpected. A tech-savvy stranger on Fiverr probably could’ve done better.

But more than that: I remember being surprised at how mean it was. Little of what the model produced even felt like a joke; instead, it just read as a slew of very personal insults.

And then I remember being surprised that the artificial cruelty actually affected me.

Despite knowing this was all a soulless (and as it turns out, humorless) machine making a poor attempt at comedy—one that nobody else even saw!—reading those words hurt. Bizarrely, I suppose, AI actually managed to hurt me.

And that was the first time I remember thinking about what AI was going to do to my children.

If I—a grown man with thick skin, hardened by decades of internet usage—can still be susceptible to highly personalized online bullying, what will it be like for my son, when some mean kid inevitably gets their hands on this technology and decides to put it to malicious use?

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