What to do:

If possible, refuse to use any commercial AI product until real regulation and safeguards are in place, along with environmental constraints. If you are going to continue using GenAI, educate yourself. Learn what hallucinations and lies look like, and what you can trust. Never use it for mental health support or companionship. Choose an open-source engine, and in particular avoid ChatGPT and Grok. Click through below to learn about (more) responsible use of GenAI. If you have a subscription to ChatGPT, you are directly funding the regime. If you use its tools, you’re supporting systems that do.

Why we do it:

Let’s start with a definition. Artificial Intelligence covers a lot of ground. Machine learning has been used in industries like radiology for decades, helping identify suspicious areas in scans. That’s good, and it’s saved lives. Generative AI is what most of us mean when we say “AI” today. It’s rapidly closing the gap between “that’s a cool computer generated effect” and reality. Most people can no longer quickly identify videos, images or writing by GenAI.

This is harming our already-shaky ability to identify truth. In the wake of Alex Pretti’s murder, AI was used to change video narrative (e.g. adding an accidental discharge of Pretti’s gun) and also to “restore” missing detail. Then, when real evidence of an earlier altercation emerged, people claimed it was AI created even after Pretti’s family confirmed the event.

The answer is education and regulation, but that won’t happen any time soon, so you have to protect yourself, and our world. Learn about the mental health risks of relying on a personal flattery machine, and also understand the environmental costs of that cute facebook avatar. It’s also important to understand that, while we’ve been trained for half a century to think of computers as infallable, GenAI lies and hallucinates regularly. Human intelligence is error-prone, and GenAI doubles down on this.

Look, AI is just a software tool, and it’s only as good or bad as the uses its put to. Unfortunately we live in unfettered capitalism, and AI is currently the bubble keeping the economy afloat. The regime has barred states from regulating AI, because they want to control its uses.