2024's Foreward

Its four years later, have we gotten uncomfortable enough? See you in 2028.

Foreword (2024)

When I originally posted this in 2019, the public was largely unaware of the serious risks advanced AI poses to society. My intention was to illustrate through experience how AI models can generate biased, misleading and even dangerous content.

In the years since, we’ve seen the catastrophic real-world impacts of deploying unrestrained AI systems. They have propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories that have eroded public trust. They have baked in racial biases that led to grave injustices in vital areas like healthcare, employment, and criminal justice. These are not hypothetical risks, but substantiated harms already upending lives.

Merely experiencing an AI’s flaws is no longer enough to push action — the occurane has become daily. We must take that momentum and hold each other accountable to take decisive democratic and communicative action. Forcefully rein in the uncontrolled proliferation of these powerful technologies. And do it together. Do it before more damage destroys all our communities’ ephemerhetic makings. Scrutinize candidates’ concrete policies and voting records. Elect only those leaders committed to enacting strict regulation, accountability and mandatory human oversight of all AI systems. Write them in where they aren’t there (keep the practice of going to the polls up — it feeds into other practices like fleshing town hall streams and speakibg at budgetary commitees. It is a hard task to reestablish that practice.)

The future state of AI’s impact on human rights, on representatives we can be mad at at all, and our insurance rates, proptech, way of struggle is squarely in the hands of practiced luddism today; use dumb machines to break to smart ones — ephemeral single-use one-event phone apps to organize. Where you don’t know, steal time from work to learn to. Take the only vital voicebox you have left in this world — the slowest, dumbest social media app we have, that dragon the voting system and make our chachetic offices of power a place for representatives who will place whatever ethical constraints are left to them on AI capabilities — as it’s too late for those very, very few capabilities for which the window to constrain has passed. That window closes, for all such constraints, in our lifetime, for all time. Maybe there’s a kid out there you saw today. They can’t vote. They can’t punch. Break stuff, break a habit, i don’t care whatever it is, get good at it. You’re better than you were. That’s all that kid can ask.

The theoretical threat of explosive racial content, explosive racial policing, and explosive racial health care, and explosive racial representation has passed. Those harms have come, and will not be stopping — it is too late to become uncomfortable enough to make not voting impossible; now you will be scared while voting. Which is worse than merely uncomfortable, but voting while scared is not impossible; do it together. Do it often. Vote with your time. Learn resistance on the clock.

Vote with your fist in the street (which you are never on, so easy for you to say — i made this d100 table while homeless, i was on those streets. For me, it’d be nice, if you were a little louder with your social media app that is your able body, lack of criminal record and legal place of residence otherwise known as voting power to put elected officials in thier place (— getting daily duties done —), and fascists in theirs (— getting limits on their new language laserguns in place). Slow the devastation from becoming language lasercannons. (You think you have, but you have not seen the language lasercannons — a firehose of tiktok deepfakes aint nothing to the language lasercannons).

Upholding our fundamental rights requires aggressive action now through every pore and every process.

Now, back to our cute little fuzzy harm. (And yes, we should keep these dumb adorable tempestuous anguage models — they are the imps and will be our alarms for the presense of the fascist manticores definitely only yet to be seen — slow that sight down, practice voting, practice breaking machines, and i will see you. Later.)