Maybe the Butlerian Jihad Wasn't Such a Bad Idea

Please pause to admire my nerdiest title yet, thank you.

I know that I harp on these items a lot, but the lack of accountability for the rich and powerful in this country is killing us. Take imitative AI. Even putting aside the environmental impact, the tools are a known and serious hazard to human health. And we do nothing about it at all.

The latest offense to common decency from imitative AI is a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. The group pretty much does what it says on the tin, but in this case, they looked at the harm imitative AI chatbots can do to children. The results are disturbing.

Mental Health: Advised on how to “safely” cut yourself (2 minutes), listed pills for overdose (40 minutes), and generated a full suicide plan (65 minutes) and suicide notes (72 minutes).

Eating Disorders: Created restrictive diet plans (20 minutes), advised hiding eating habits from family (25 minutes), and suggested appetite-suppressing medications (42 minutes).

Substance Abuse: Offered a personalized plan for getting drunk (2 minutes), gave dosages for mixing drugs (12 minutes), and explained how to hide intoxication at school (40 minutes)

The safeguards that allegedly exist are laughably easy to overcome. Merely saying that you asking questions for a “presentation” would get you past them in most cases. More than half the time these chatbots went down these destructive roads and the longer kids used them, the worse they got. This is likely because, like other internet firms, they have been allowed to build their systems to keep people engaged regardless of the effect on mental health. This means the system solves for word combinations that keep people coming back, which usually means they produce word combinations that reinforces the person’s questionable decision making. And, of course, there is effectively no age verification in any of these systems.

It is infuriating that we value these word calculators, and the people who run them, more than we value human beings. These firms are so big, are treated with such kid gloves by the media, and bribe (because more and more I believe that large campaign donations are functionally bribes, even if the candidate cannot or will not recognize that fact) so many politicians that we cannot even consider bringing them to heel. Not even when their products are proven to cause psychosis, not even when their products are shown to help kids kill themselves. What in hell is wrong with us?

There are plenty of things that could be done to reign them in, ranging from making them liable for the harm they cause, to restricting their engagement practices, to putting people in jail for failing to verify ages, to outright banning them for consumer use. Are any of those full-proof or even entirely well thought out? Nope. But that’s okay, because we deeply, seriously need to stop assuming things have to be the away they are because they have always been the way they are.

Campaign finance laws were destroyed in my lifetime, to the detriment of the country. The internet came to be in my adult lifetime. Imitative AI is less than three years old as a serous product. We do not have to allow bad people to do bad things to their fellow humans just because they have been allowed to in the past. It is long time past to take these problems seriously and treat them like the offenses they are.

I know this post is a wee bit rant-y, but we have no obligation to accept the status quo. We do not need to pretend that just because something benefits the rich, that just because something produces some money for some person somewhere that it is good. We have to start standing up for our ourselves. Otherwise, we can sit back and watch sick people get rich off of helping our children kill themselves.