"Voice of God": The Truth About AI Assistants
AI assistants are shaping up to serve as the most powerful brainwashing tool the tech industry has yet unleashed. If you're using AI as a consumer, brace yourself for a new, multi-billion dollar propaganda-pump.
There's a common belief that artificial intelligence took a giant leap in efficiency during 2022. All that really happened was that it turned into a search engine and repackaged the output to cut out the sources and the choice…
It's true. Whilst AI assistants have been pitched as mindful robots with human sensibilities, they're actually just search engines in which the results are edited, reworded, and filtered to a degree we'd never accept from a conventional SERP.
ChatGPT, Bard and their ilk are an unfettered, direct and inscrutable means for demonstrably evil corporations to tell you anything they think you'll believe. What could possibly go wrong with a concept like that?
Imagine if, ten years ago, you'd entered a query into Google Search and been served just one result. And beneath that solitary result, the Mountain View Monolith had presented you with a small-print disclaimer saying: "Content algorithmically edited and recomposed in accordance with Google's presentation policies". Would you have considered that a satisfactory outcome?
I'm guessing you'd have gasped at the audacity of a search provider thinking it could filter out 99.999% of the available results, and serve you only one, which most reflected its own opinion. Further edited. Further edited to the point that it could, actually, be nothing but the scripted doctrine of a technology corporation with a deeply self-serving agenda. But that's exactly how AI assistants work. They search a database, and return one result, manipulated in any way the provider sees fit.
The only difference between an AI assistant and the hypothetical Google scenario above, is that an AI assistant presents itself as an independently-thinking voice. But that's not what it is. It's a search engine with nearly all of the results removed, and some automated rewording to prevent you from finding out which Big Brother-approved content factory is the source of the bullshit you're reading.
Under these circumstances, we would have to be insane to imagine that the AI assistant will turn out to be anything but a propaganda delivery system for control-crazed lunatics who have already shown they want to rule the world. ChatGPT, Bard and their ilk are an unfettered, direct and inscrutable means for demonstrably evil corporations to tell you anything they think you'll believe. What could possibly go wrong with a concept like that?
AI assistants are essentially a "voice of God". They replace thousands of varying takes, hypotheses and suspicions, with a single, definitive assertion. With sufficient global reach, the value of something like this to an elite propagandist is unprecedented in world history. $Billions will be offered to AI assistant providers in corrupt deals. Do you really think said providers - already known for their moral bankruptcy - are gonna turn that money down?
CONVENIENCE TAX
Unfortunately, consumers are very, very, very, very lazy. Big Brother knows and aggressively exploits that. So much so, that there's a very solid law of economics behind the subject of convenience.
You see, the level of convenience attached to the things you do online is not in any way incidental. The tech industry always regulates convenience in proportion to what the tech industry stands to gain. Where there's nothing to gain, things are deliberately made inconvenient. Where there's quite a bit to gain, things are made quite convenient. And where there's most to gain, things are made really bloody humungously convenient.
So with regard to AI assistants, we have to ask ourselves a three-part question…
- How convenient are they?
Answer: monumentally convenient. More convenient than any other means of finding "information".
- Why have AI assistants been made so monumentally convenient?
Answer: because the tech industry expects them to result in a monumental level of gain.
- What is this monumental level of gain that the tech industry expects AI assistants to deliver?
This is still open to a lot of speculation. But with a medium that can essentially act as the "voice of God", the possibilities are near endless. What we can say with a pretty high degree of certainty, is that consumer-facing AI assistants will become propagandists for hire - rented as digital billboards to the highest bidder with no regard at all for ethics. The problem is that with a direct line between Big Brother and the public - which is exactly what AI assistants are - we lose our audit trail on the sources of information.
With traditional search and social media, we could follow links until we reached a source, and then assess whether that source was credible. But with AI assistants, a source can be wholly obfuscated or simply omitted from the attributions - if attributions are even provided at all. So the messages we receive could be coming from anywhere. We just have to trust the tech industry to act with integrity. And we all know how that story ends.
There is nothing wrong with calling for an immediate, outright ban of high-risk technologies that are moving too fast to be properly evaluated.
There are so many huge players who could offer market-dominant tech corps billions to shill out propaganda through "voice of God" dissemination mechanisms. "Chat bot" sounds very sweet and harmless, and Big Tech is well accomplished in draping evil in cute language. But let's not underestimate the power of these things to ramp up the societal misery that the tech elite have already become renowned for spreading.
We already expect AI assistants to disseminate misinformation. But we should be ready for the moment when the reason behind that misinformation transitions from "teething troubles", to corruption.
Severing information from its source is singularly the most dangerous path that a form of mass-public education could take. It doesn't just allow above-the-law crooks to hide behind an "algorithm". It also strips away some of the protections that shield impressionable minds from indoctrination.
How, for example, do you implement parental controls or restrictions when the sources of the information are unknown? If everything is just going to be scraped up into a vast database and then puked out with all sources totally bypassed, how does Mum stop Junior reading content from sites she considers inappropriate? With a search engine, a parental block kicks in upon clickthrough. That doesn't work with an AI bot.
OUT OF CONTROL
The ethical concerns surrounding AI have started to shift from the very obvious, like mass worklessness, dangerous concentration of wealth, osmosed prejudice, potential privacy violations and theft of intellectual property, to the deeper considerations associated with detaching the source from a message. Alongside many other emerging problems, it should be stressed. And that's before we even get to the sci-fi stuff like robots "seizing the steering wheel".
An AI assistant is a search engine with nearly all of the results removed, and some automated rewording to prevent you from finding out which Big Brother-approved content factory is the source of the bullshit you're reading.
It attests to the fact that elite tech's power has long since outstripped that of government, that something could promise this much damage, without any serious politician even daring to discuss a ban.
Let me be the one to say it. There is nothing wrong with calling for an immediate, outright ban of high-risk technologies that are moving too fast to be properly evaluated. Ban them, evaluate them, and then introduce them with proper legal restrictions if their risks can be mitigated.
We don't owe elite tech a moderate stance. It's never taken a moderate stance with us.