Entirely serious AI regulation suggestion: chat bots mimicking human interaction NEED to be illegal. If there is a chatbot its tone needs to be bone dry and factual at all times. Emotional statements must not be made. This regulation is necessary due to proven risks of psychosis, addiction and humanisation of a machine resulting social isolation, alienation, paranoia and manipulation.
Support groups and therapy (preferably group therapy) need to be set up for people recovering from AI chatbot addiction.
Also, if your data or your work are to be used to train an AI, you need to be the one to sell it. Not opt out. YOU need to be the one saying, hey, I want to monetise my product and/or my personal life in this way! I’ll sign a contract and give it to you.
Your data and your products BELONG TO YOU. Companies SHOULD NOT be allowed to assume they own everything you do because you use their service, same as postal services not reading your letters. They’re already making money off the ads they show you, they DO NOT need to use your private chats to train people-imitating machines. We have enough people on this planet. If you need more workers, there’s people who’re looking for jobs! People who need money! Real people!
Microsoft DOES NOT need to screenshot your screen every five seconds and use it to train its AI. That’s surveillance, that’s theft. We don’t need them. We can boycott them. Their programs have been getting more and more unusable anyways.
Just because the internet has been a data free-for-all so far doesn’t mean it needs to continue to be.
Check out Pause AI if you want to partake in peaceful anti AI activism. They have some good petitions, for starters. If we need to achieve something we need to be organised, people. And I’m saying that even though I’m not much of an activist myself. I don’t WANT to do politics. I WANT to be a writer. But I’ll do what has to be done.
We are risking human extinction. We need to pause AI development, right now.
Also, a disclaimer for all my literal thinkers who also got horror-trapped by understandably grim nihilists: AI DOES NOT necessarily have to mean human extinction or the collapse of society. We’re still in control. Many governments and the UN are calling for regulation and carefully controlled AI development. If we don’t want this technology as the great mass of people (and the AI dislike is growing), we can push for and eventually achieve very exact, safe and limiting laws and regulations.
Of course, nothing is ever entirely safe. But action requires confidence and hope, not fear-mongering and pessimism. So go hug someone if you feel bad. Most of life happens outside the digital sphere.
Remember continuing to make art is also resistance! It’s a refusal to let them spoil what you enjoy. Keep creating. Keep posting your creations. Remind people human art is still being made and is infinitely more beautiful than AI slop. (And isn’t it funny how AI art always lacks expression? You can really tell it has no soul.)
Life is supposed to go on. So make sure it does.
