"Friends" don't manipulate you to maximize profits for nameless third-party corporations, though that is precisely what these "AIs" are being built to do. They are not your "Friend" they are corporate employees, pretending to be your friend in service of corporate profit, and every "Friend" like behavior they exhibit will be carefully crafted to maximize their manipulative potential in order to get you to do more of whatever makes them money.
AIs will deceive, manipulate and outright lie to you to get you to buy consumerist crap the companies who own the AIs are being paid to promote, and they will bend, distort and break the truth to promote the sociopolitical biases of the companies who own them and various nefarious corporate and state actors who pay them to do so on their behalf.
People think AI is going to help them find the best deals on a flight or a new car, whereas what will actually happen is the AI will just recommend whatever airline or automaker the company who owns the AI is being paid to promote. People think AI will help them find the truth, but in reality it will just peddle whatever lie the company behind it is paid the most to perpetuate. People think AI will provide them the connection and companionship so sorely lacking in the modern world, but in reality it will just serve to isolate them further, whilst merrily manipulating them to buy crap they don't need and that won't make them happy.
AI is not going to be anyone's friend, it is going to be yet another tool of class control and wealth extraction used by the ruling elites to ensure their power and privileged is protected. AI is going make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and will likely destroy whatever is left of democracy in the process.
And yes, sure people can "Roll their own" AIs and hopefully have some control of the technology in order to mitigate the problems I mentioned above, but this is functionally irrelevant, as 99%+ of AI users are not going to be people with the technical skill to implement their own AI on their own devices, but will rather be using Chat GPT or whatever other AI as a subscription or "Ad supported" AI as a service type things that come after it. I have yet so see a single consumer facing at scale AI company that's actually selling a user owner / controlled and self-hosted AI product, as all the AI gold-rushers realize that's not where the money is. The money is in scaling a platform to replace Google and selling ads through that platform just like Google does.
We live at specific point in history where as a whole things are trending in the direction you are warning about, but if you zoom out further the trend as a whole is the opposite. Civilization oscillates between win-win, win-lose, lose-lose, win-win over multiple generations. It seems we are transitioning right now from a win-lose to a lose-lose (average) dynamic.
We absolutely should all be worried right now about what you're saying, and resist it as pragmatically as possible, but a generation from now all that resistance will gain momentum and steer everything towards a much better outcome. Also, all products eventually become commodities.
All this to say: don't give up, take responsibility and do whatever constructive good you can, and have some faith that it will work out much better in the long run. It both kinds sucks to be living through this but is also an amazing opportunity to have a historically outsized positive impact. The most impactful opportunities to do good are when almost everything is going bad.
skybrian•3mo ago