Goldberg: Which party will lead the fight to rein in AI?

By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times

I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”

AI obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long.

A very partial accounting might start with education, both in the classroom, where AI is increasingly used as a dubious teaching aid, and out of it, where it’s a plagiarism machine. It would include the economic sustainability and basic humanity of the arts, as demonstrated by the AI country musician who topped a Billboard chart this year. High on the list would be AI’s impact on employment, which is already bad — including for those who must navigate a demoralizing AI-clogged morass to find jobs — and likely to get worse.

Then there’s our remaining sense of collective reality, increasingly warped by slop videos. AI data centers are terrible for the environment and are driving up the cost of electricity. Chatbots appear to be inducing psychosis in some users and even, in extreme cases, encouraging suicide. Privacy is eroding as AI enables both state and corporate surveillance at an astonishing scale. I could go on.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/goldberg-which-party-will-lead-the-fight-to-rein-in-ai/