Imitative AI and the Pathologies of Modern Life

This post started because Ana Marie Cox, unsurprisingly, wrote a Bluesky thread that ruminated on how imitative AI’s reach into people’s lives is part of the pathology of loneliness affecting the country. Also unsurprisingly, I cannot find the original thread. I do not blame myself for knowing I was thinking about the post and would likely write about it and still not save the link. No, I blame Bluesky’s search function. Regardless, I did think about it, and I think that it is the sort of skeleton key as to why imitative AI is both so dangerous and so prevalent.

Anne Marie Cox made the point that we are a very disconnected society, especially for kids, and that disconnection feeds the use, and thus the damage, of imitative AI. A significant portion of teens use chatbots regularly, and not just for things like their homework. They use them for comfort, for companionship, to do things like try out conversational lines before using them in public. Cox rightfully points out that this use is at least in part a sign of how little human interaction teenagers can get, and how high-pressure that action can seem. That is both true and our fault.

We have spent decades taking away the spaces that teenagers used to be able to use to be, well, teenagers. Malls have faded, town centers are often empty, and we have become more and more restrictive about where we do and do not allow teenagers to congregate. When I was a teenager, we would hang out in parks and on the beach after dark. When I was in college, the towns in the area I lived at the time made a huge push to close the parks after dark, specifically to keep teens from using them. Even little things, like the amount of homework kids are expected to do today, limit the amount of time they have to just be kids. Is it any wonder they turn to fake interactions when their real lives are so circumscribed?

The homework is just one aspect of how we have broken schools. College students, in particular, hate imitative AI, even as they use it. But they do use it. They see their teachers push it. They see their teachers use it to grade the work they hand in. They see others in their cohort use it and be rewarded with good grades for ignoring the worst. And because we have converted schools from a place to learn into a place to get credentials, we have taught students that grades are the only things that matter. The world, we are told, is a meritocracy, and grades are a measure of your merit, at least when you are starting out. Who would risk a lower grade in that kind of environment?

And who would risk not investing in imitative AI in today’s Wall Street environment? We are living in a world where clever buggers are creating solutions to the world’s hardest problems. Electric battery storage is making rapid improvements. Chinese car firms have created cars that can charge in a handful of minutes. Solar panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient. We are on the cusp of having vaccines that can prevent and cure multiple cancers. But what attracts almost all the investment in this country? Imitative AI and the data centers needed to keep imitative AI afloat. Wall Street and VC firms, in the desperate hope of eliminating entire categories of white-collar jobs, have oriented our collective investment money almost entirely toward these technologies, ignoring more important, and more likely to make money, sectors.

And that desperation to end white-collar work also explains why so many employees are being forced to use it and why they feel so terrible about it. Losing your job in the US is very close to a death sentence. Your ability to feed, clothe, and get healthcare for you and your loved ones depends almost entirely upon your ability to keep a job. So even if you want to resist the use of imitative AI — whether for moral reasons or because it simply does not work — you have to in order to survive as long as possible. We know no help will be coming. We have seen what happens when the billionaires are in charge — tax cuts for them, service cuts for everyone else, destroying the scientific community that has driven so much economic activity and improvements in the lives of everyday people, and cutting off aid to the most in need with no warning or backup plans, resulting in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths. If imitative AI ever does become the economic powerhouse its boosters tell you it will inevitably grow into, we already know that the rich will reap all the rewards and the devil will take the rest of us.

American society is broken at almost every level. It has a pathological avoidance of mutual aid, of responsibility for those in power. It often treats its children as either criminals to be feared or nuisances to be contained. It has no sense of meaningful work and values money, however attained, above all. Imitative AI, with its ability to sound like a person and its promise of unlimited wealth for the already wealthy, slides into the gaps left by our ruins. It doesn’t fill those gaps or rebuild those ruins, but it does something that, sometimes, looks like it might. Imitative AI is as much a symptom of our broken world as a cause of the destruction. The cure, then, is not only about controlling the damage imitative AI can do, but fixing the pathologies that allow it so much power.