Grown adults who should know better are saying and thinking ridiculous things induced by either childish excitement or Machiavellian purposes, and often both. The worst part though is that many of these grown adults have vast financial capital to put behind their plans.
It is a Pandora’s Box, and the lid has been flung wide open, and the AI industry, if it doesn’t collapse the economy, is accelerating our energy use, water use and environmental destruction.
What can we as individuals do?
Our deliberate interaction with AI is mostly via search engines, browsers and apps, to access the “LLMs” – large language models that provide spoken, written, graphical or video answers to what we write in the LLM prompt. When doing this:
- ask yourself first if you need AI to do what you’re about to ask it to do
- choose an LLM that’s not directly connected to the worst things that are going on in our society, like the Palestine Genocide or the authoritarian take-over of US democracy – EcoCounts recommends Mistral.
- don’t provide the LLM with any personal details which you wish to keep private (here I mean bank account details and phone numbers, although who knows, it might not be safe to mention any secrets)
- LLMs are machines. Do not make the mistake of thinking there is anything sentient in it. Treat them just like robots. Command them, don’t say please and watch your own thinking.
- for goodness’ sake, double check anything an LLM tells you unless it really is just for fun. LLMs “hallucinate” and produce a lot of “AI slop”, i.e. they are frequently wrong, low quality, or both.
