During Covid someone in my neighbourhood invested in a can of spray paint and used their two-kilometre allowance to indulge in some street art. Their work wasn’t aesthetically pleasing. Rather it was in the “doom-laden chicken scratching” genre of graffiti. Among the warnings about killer jabs and Chinese conspiracies, though, was one portent that stuck with me. It warned about the dangers of “sleepwalking into a cashless society”.
“That’s a dig at me,” I thought, possibly psychologically addled by the continuing pandemic and the crushing monotony of the daily silly little walk. “I’m the ignoramus, stumbling blithely into a digital hellscape.” I’ve long been very accepting of technological advances, despite warnings of the dangers. When people caution against giving all one’s personal data to social media companies and supermarkets, my attitude has been, “Let them have it! The world is burning and I’m ageing rapidly, and I don’t want to pay €14 for deodorant.” Who cares if they know what I like? What harm if they track what I buy? Ooooooh, they might advertise to me based on my preferences? The monsters!
I don’t feel particularly good about this, what would I call it, digital ignorance. It’s getting harder and harder to keep my head in the sand about online manipulation. My late-night catastrophising sessions have me worrying that allowing huge companies to sell my data might make me personally liable for funding fascism and the rise of the far right. I don’t need that on my conscience when I’m just one person who cannot fathom clicking “accept cookies” seven times a day for the rest of my life. Jeff Bezos can have my pin number if it means the cookies can be eternally accepted.
I don’t want the billionaires to win, obviously. But just as washing out the yoghurt cartons in a bid to save the planet feels futile, fighting back against Big Tech, Big Landlord, Big Pharma and all the other Bigs seems insurmountable.
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Take AI. I’ve had my head buried so far into the sand regarding AI that I’m surprised I haven’t burned my nose on the Earth’s molten core.
At a recent literary event I was asked my opinion on AI and I didn’t have a good answer. I blustered a bit about Meta using my novels to train its artificial intelligence systems and that this is, of course, a very bad thing. Then I did a bit of fence-sitting about AI being used “for good” and the possibility of its potential and left it there. Honestly, the idea of Complete Aisling books training computer brains tickles me. Which indicates strongly that I need to think more critically about it. I need to care more about it.
I was a teenager when the internet started pushing its way into our homes. We had a family computer and the Encarta CD-ROM. Encarta was an “interactive multimedia encyclopedia” and, to me, it contained everything that we could ever wish to know about the world. I was frightened by the breadth of its contents, and worried that I would never be able to get around to every corner of it.
The internet, then, terrified me. I fretted that there would simply be too much information for me to potentially look up and I would never reach the end.
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This fear of never being able to know everything the internet had to offer kept me away from it for a year or two. Ignorance felt safer than oblivion. AI presents a similar void. I feel that by keeping a distance between myself and it, I can’t know what I’m missing or ignoring. There is so much potential for good, and yet so many warnings about disasters we haven’t even conceived of yet.
I do actually care about my work being used by Meta to train its AI systems. I just feel helpless to do anything about it. I am worried about AI-generated art and the axe blow to creativity. I’ve never asked Chat GPT to “write an Irish Times column by Emer McLysaght”, not because I don’t think it would be able to produce anything but because I’m afraid that maybe it would, and it would drag me for filth in the process. “Oooh, I’m a millennial cat lady who’s afraid of phone calls and beans. Read all about it.”
If AI really is coming for my job, I’d like to see it procrastinate for six hours before actually attacking the task. I’d like to see it pay the rent on a freelance writer’s income. And look, if it can figure out how to buy the right-sized black sacks for the kitchen bin, I’ll take it.
