The essence
- Ethical crisis in AI. AI is not just a technology problem, but an ethical crisis, driven by a culture of manipulation, greed and deceit in Big Tech.
- Grow at all costs. The relentless pursuit of growth fuels unethical AI practices, which prioritize profit over social good and transparency.
- Manipulative marketing tactics. Modern AI excels at exploiting human vulnerabilities and transforming advertising into a powerful tool for deception.
Morals, ethics and character are important. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is steeped in fast and greedy characters, creating an AI ethics crisis.
AI is the latest craze like bitcoin or blockchain. It’s the latest way scammers, scammers, and scammers think they can scam, scam, scam. It is the latest magnet for the fast and greedy.
This does not mean that deep within AI there are not profound important developments taking place that have the capacity to radically reshape society and our world. environment for the better. That doesn’t mean there aren’t many great scientists and developers working on AI.
It means that the people who matter – the people who make the decisions – tend to be crooks, swindlers, and ruthless con artists. Bad characters working with a bad model will create bad software that creates a bad society.
Exposing the AI ethics crisis: Manipulation and moral decay in technology
Modern AI is advertising. It emerged from the great advertising minds of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. Advertising has always been about lying and targeting vulnerable people focused on vulnerabilities from everyone else. It is constantly looking for our weaknesses.
As a marketer once bragged to me, “The best marketing is when I make you buy something and you don’t even know why.” AI really excels at this kind of manipulation. Freed from verisimilitude, it can search through millions of combinations of words or images to find just the right combination that will trigger a buying response from you. The truth for AI is the sale, the conversion or the convert, whether it’s selling a politician or a fake skin cream.
Over the years I have met many people behind advertising strategies. They have no problem with what they do. In fact, they think this is the right thing to do: take power and money away from some loser who doesn’t deserve it because he’s a loser, and give that money and power to smarter, stronger people.
Related article: The efficiency fraud of AI and Big Tech
Growth at all costs: fueling the AI ethics crisis
Many of the worst practices stem from the voracious need for rapid growth and ever-increasing acceleration. We can bring almost all injustice back to the door of the Growth Death Cult, and in the mirror galleries of the Growth Death Cult we will see the priests of eugenics whispering their mantras of piety.
As Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres wrote for the first Monday: “Much of the same discriminatory attitudes that past animated eugenicists (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain prevalent within the movement to build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power while using the language of ‘safety’ and ‘benefiting humanity’ to avoid responsibility.”
It has often been left to women of color like Gebru to stand in front of the unstoppable train. Her Mastodon profile states that she “fired from Google for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace and for writing about the dangers of large language models.” Addressing the ethical crisis in AI requires a fundamental change in values.
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