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One of my favorite tech journalists is fielding messages about the effect AI has had on peoples' jobs. He recently wrote about Duolingo's shift to AI over humans, and it got enough feedback for him to start a whole new series on how this tech is creeping into every industry in damaging ways. Check out the link! (@TORTITUDE Your post got me thinking about this!)
5d ago
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Ugh I love that. I’ve already been on my soapbox about its effect on customer service past two years, but it’s almost more damaging now that we’re in a world where the expectation is also to use it in all personal work streams. Like great lemme go drain a lake to make stupid lil slides.
5d ago
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Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.
Mar 24, 2024
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Boo I hate the outsourcing of labour! Was reading an essay/talk from Stephen Fry and wanted to share
“We have long been used to thinking of technology as being ethically neutral, lacking moral valency. The same press can print Shakespeare’s sonnets one day and Hitler’s Mein Kampf the next. The devices are not capable of making decisions, either aesthetic, ethical or political. The NRA likes to say the same thing about guns. Ai however is different. Intelligence is all about decision making. That’s what separates it from automated, mechanically determined outcomes. That’s what separates a river from a canal. A canal must go where we tell it. A river is led by nothing but gravity and if that means flooding a town, tough on the town. Ai’s gravity is its goals. Unsupervised machine learning allows for unsupervised machines — and for the independent agents that flow from them.„
Mar 10, 2025
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A.I. used to make art cheaper and to avoid paying artists is abhorrent. Used to write speeches and summarize books reduces the practice and makes the accomplishment meaningless. It cheapens the process and provides no value. The way it’s being advertised is nothing short of disgusting. Google aired an ad where a father uses A.I. to help his daughter write a letter to her favorite athlete. Why are you shortcutting time spent with your daughter, teaching her how to put emotion into words, helping her work through something challenging? It’s soulless dreck. I’m tired of hearing about it, talking about it and thinking about all the ways it can ruin society. Since corporations and industry insist on shoving it down our throat, I think it’s (as always) our responsibility to demand better. The linked essay made me reconsider the use of it as a tool to expand, as you put it, as long as it’s not used to enable laziness and shortcuts.
Jan 14, 2025
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The perfect lil snack for when you don’t want a big snack
Apr 3, 2024
Here it is, folks! Volume I of what could very well be a continuous project. Thank you so much to everyone that submitted - I smiled the entire time I was putting this together. It's best listened to with headphones ☺️
Liner Notes:
This collection of field recordings is a collaborative effort with users of PI.FYI, each of which recorded their own pieces. It features audio from all over the world and exhibits eclectic moments from London Underground commutes to cuckoo bird calls in Dhaka to the sounds of a century-old American diner.
Online communities like PI.FYI often represent a diverse set of people, places, and experiences, but together, the submissions form a living collage that highlights the commonalities of modern life - a unifying message for such a tumultuous time. The first track features all of the sounds played at once in an attempt to create an audio snapshot of an online community but in their offline lives.
The individual recordings are unedited except for minor gain and compression adjustments for consistency across the collection.
Mar 29, 2025
