Pushback and accountability
By Emily
In the midst of all of the political chaos these past few weeks have brought, the drumbeat of AI hype continues unabated, and indeed, it is often interwoven with the havoc that Trump, Musk, their allies in the GOP, and the rest of the tech billionaires are wrecking.
We'll keep covering that hype and its consequences in the podcast and future newsletter posts, but just now, I wanted to share a few items from the enormous spreadsheet of links we've been collecting that stand out amidst the Fresh AI Hell. These are the ones tagged "accountability/good pushback".
My purpose here is both to provide a little reprieve and a reminder that none of this is inevitable. Refusal matters, and I hope that you'll take inspiration from these items to refuse, resist, push back and demand accountability.
In no particular order, please enjoy:
- The always magnificent Elle Cordana's recent video Siri and Alexa say goodbye to Cortana. Be sure to watch it all the way to the end. (There's some irony here about paperclips, and their varied roles in the history of chatbots/AI.) (December 2024)
- Denise Utochkin, post-doc at the University of Copenhagen, beautifully called out their university's head-long rush into using "AI". They write: "The aspiration to prepare students for the real world is commendable, indeed vital. But when encountering such calls, we should be mindful of what world exactly we are being invited to consider real." (August 2024)
- Ann Leckie, whom you might know from her delightful speculative fiction work, including the Imperial Radch series which foregrounds AI characters, had some sharp words about all the excitement around ChatGPT. (December 2024)
- Cadbury, as part of an ad campaign, chimes in with some pretty insightful analysis of "AI". (November 2024)
- Remember the "AI"-generated humanities course at UCLA? (We covered it briefly in our December all-hell episode.) James Folta LitHub has a cathartic take-down of it. Nerniacular Latin, indeed. (December 2024)
- Researchers at USC, Bocconi University, and George Washington University found that AI literacy and AI receptivity are inversely correlated. They take from this that "companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development towards consumers with lower AI literacy. Additionally, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal, indicating that maintaining an aura of magic around AI could be beneficial for adoption." Seems like exactly the wrong lesson to take away, but we're counting this one as good news because it shows that once we can (collectively) cut through the hype, people reach good conclusions. Keep it up! (January 2025)
- The algorithmic artist Ada Ada Ada did some excellent, long-term performance art entitled In Transitu exposing the arbitrariness of Instagram's nudity filter. She told 404media's Emanuel Maiberg “It seemed like the nipple rule is one of the simplest ways that you can start talking about this because it's set up as a very binary idea—female nipples no, male nipples, yes. But then it prompts a lot of questions: what is male nipple? What is a female nipple?” (October 2024)
- Finally, even in the last weeks before the transition, Lina Khan's FTC kept up their excellent work holding tech companies accountable. This blog post summarizes some of it. Functioning regulatory bodies can exist. It's worth clawing our way back there. (January 2025)
Oh, and finally -- not exactly about "AI" directly, but some nice pushback against the power of big tech: Bookshop.org now has ebooks, expanding their mission to support local booksellers and providing an alternative to Amazon's stranglehold on this super-convenient format. (As far as we can tell, this requires US-based payment methods, but it's a start.) Among other ebooks, THE AI CON is available for pre-order there!
Our book, The AI Con, is out on May 13, 2025, but you can pre-order it now where ever fine books are sold! 