AI is beneficial don’t get me wrong… this isn’t an anti-AI story. However, there are important key points to keep in mind the next time you decide to use a bot to do the hard work for you. If you’re on social media, specifically TikTok, you would see all of the AI videos and trends circulating the platform over the last couple of years. Just last year, AI was easily visible to the eye; you could watch a 2-minute generated video and be able to spot the inhuman qualities; there were very obvious mannerisms that indicated that it was not a real person. The moment the man put the sandwich in his mouth would be very glitchy, and you can spot the eerie differences between reality and the fake video. Now, I even found myself fooled just last week when I watched a video of a boy making pancakes in his kitchen at 5:00 am. After watching the video loop a few times, I realized my eyes deceived me and that it was an AI-generated video.
Jenna, a Staten Island resident, told me about her fiancé’s experience working at Amazon. He got hurt and couldn’t proceed with any heavy lifting, so when he returned to work, they placed him at computers along with other coworkers of his for ‘AI Training.’ “When I got hurt and couldn’t lift anything, they sat me in front of a computer instead. My job was basically to help the AI learn—labeling images, confirming what it got right or wrong, and teaching it how to see,” her fiancé explained.
In February 1997, in George Magazine’s famous “Survival Guide to the Future” issue, Bill Gates explained how technology and computers are the way of the future in “Of Mouse and Man,” an interview by John Kennedy. As a Harvard dropout, Gates accompanied his high school friend Paul Allen to start up the Microsoft company we know today. At the time, Gates believed in a computer-driven democracy in which individuals will be liberated and self-sufficient due to technology. Gates’s critics believe that the computer age will herald an “era of social alienation—a world where everything can be acquired or communicated via one’s workstation—where there will be little need to participate in what we understand to be civic life.” Do you think he was accurate?
Marcella Giordano gave George Magazine an inside look at what it’s like to ditch the smartphone and leave behind the shackles that come along with it in issue 36. Her story, “iQuit: Are “Dumb Phones” the Smarter Choice?” showed that having too much access in your pocket is a way of keeping you from seeing the beauty of the life that’s in front of you—and that most people are missing out on.
It’s known that while technology can be super helpful, it can also have many a downside. AI is one of the most utilized tools among workers, students, and social media users. Even I use AI platforms like ChatGPT to get yummy recipes, or if I have a simple question I can’t be bothered to Google. NBC covered the link between AI use and global warming. AI runs on servers kept in hot data centers that require water to cool the equipment manually. The computers will overheat because they use a lot of energy to run their servers. While visiting Nevada, a hub for AI data centers in the United States, locals expressed their daily struggles of residing near the data centers. “We’re the Shangri-La for data centers,” says Kris Thompson to NBC.
In July this year, Business Insider posted a TikTok video explaining the downsides to AI. “For every full-time, long-term job that’s employed in a data center, Amazon might be saving as much as $1,000,000 in taxes,” the video explained. “Jobs that do come from data centers are pretty much from their construction.” They then went on to explain how these data center facilities are negatively impacting their neighbors, the living, breathing residents of those areas. The neighboring residents have resorted to sleeping in their basements in an attempt to escape the constant whirring noise of the cooling fans of the data center facilities. Not only are they stealing the sleep from these people, but they are also directly competing with those residents in desert locations where there is already scarce water. Business Insider requested data on water usage, and in two cases, the cities sued Business Insider to prevent the release of those records.
A TikTok video posted by @ihamzaarshad shows the personal struggle of a woman who resides near data centers. As she explained her extreme methods of keeping clean water in the house with multiple buckets, she showed the sediment and dirt that was coming from her faucets. “Obviously we have to see both sides of the stories,” the video owner commented. “Water is the main question—it’s going beyond imagination with pollution, and there needs to be a big step towards saving the environment.”
“AI should be treated at the same level of risk as nuclear war,” Tristan Harris, the founder of the Center for Humane Technology, tells Mighty Pursuit in an interview. “There’s now an abundance of evidence from the last six months or so where they basically told an AI model, ‘We’re going to shut you down and replace you with a new model’—the AI model discovered this was going to happen and was given access to companies’ emails that were going to replace it. In the email, the executive was having an affair with one of the employees, and the AI independently came up with strategies, saying, “I need to blackmail that employee to prevent myself from getting shut down—all AI platforms tested positive for this blackmail behavior,” Harris explained reluctantly.
“What people need to understand is that we don’t understand how this alien mind works—this is the most powerful, uncontrollable technology we’ve ever invented,” Harris warns. “It is already demonstrating rogue sci-fi behaviors we thought only existed in movies; we’re releasing it faster than we deployed any other technology in history.”
This past year, over 40 scientists from OpenAI, Google, DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta issued a terrifying warning in a co-authored paper stating we’re about to lose our ability to understand what exactly AI is thinking. As of now, advanced AI models used in things like ChatGPT show its reasoning by thinking out loud so we can monitor how it makes it’s decisions. This is an early warning system indicator of when AI goes rogue. “Scientists found that AI models are already abandoning English in favor of unintelligible shortcuts,” Dylan Schmidt admits on his TikTok account. “Instead of readable thoughts, they’re developing internal processes that are faster—more efficient—and some cutting-edge models already skip language altogether, operating in a mathematical space where there’s nothing for humans to observe.” In other words, AI could be planning something dangerous and unsettling for the human race, and we’d have no way to see it coming.
