Because AI is a globally distributed technology that promises to disrupt so many unique domains of life, it is sometimes hard to tease out exactly which domain is being disrupted and how it impacts me. Because AI is sold to us with expensive ad campaigns that promise to urgently solve any major or minor problem, it can be hard to identify any particular consequences or trade-offs that come with using it. And because AI has invaded so many different domains so quickly, we often become overwhelmed as we try to have every argument with everyone at once.
All technologies have intended and unintended trade-offs, but GenAI often doesn't give us the time or language to understand them. There are five broad categories of questions and implications I've developed to describe the different ways I believe AI affects me as an individual. I've used this quick schema with other technologies, but I think it's really useful with AI.
When confronted with a new challenge from AI technologies or companies, I have been trying to slot the challenge into one of these categories:
- 1.
Intellectual/artistic implications
- 1.
These are about how AI affects my own research and thinking in digital media. How does AI as a so-called coherent object in the world become salient in relation to what I already know and am trained to understand? They are also about how AI affects my thinking broadly. How does AI affect our ability to conduct higher-level reasoning? How does AI influence the intellectual tasks of thinking, comparison, and deliberation that this technology promises to supplement (deskilling, decline, etc)?
- 2.
Moral implications
- 1.
These are the implications for AI on our individual senses of justice, privacy, community, right and wrong. How we as individuals rationalize our decisions about our sense of self, belonging, and access to resources? How has GenAI changed our understanding of negative acts like cheating, plagiarism, and theft? How has it changed our understanding of positive acts like mercy or justice?
- 3.
Professional or ethical implications
- 1.
These are the implications for me as a professional. In this case, an educator who teaches young people and the impact of AI on the university and our professional organizations. How has GenAI in class further facilitated an atmosphere of surveillance? What are the downstream implications of primary and secondary schooling driven by these technologies? What are the professional implications and consequences to our disciplines for using AI to conduct peer-review, human subjects research, or data collection? How has GenAI changed how I interact with my colleagues, subordinates, and superiors?
- 4.
Social implications
- 1.
These are the implications of GenAI on our interpersonal relationships and society at large. How has GenAI transformed how I relate to other people in my life? How has it transformed how I understand strangers in the world? How has it resolved, created, or changed existing social problems at the family, local, regional, national, and global level? What are the implications of the wide-scale distribution of a technology whose most popular use-case is deception?
- 5.
Environmental implications
- 1.
What are the implications of Gen AI on the local, regional, and global environment? What is AI's impact on my immediately quality of life? What other uses could be found for the real earth resources that go into creating AI software and data centers? How has GenAI affected our collective ability to deal with human-driven climate change?
These categories help me distinguish between problems I can solve with my personal, professional, or teaching choices and those that can't be solved with individual action. Doing this helps me clarify what exactly is in my control here and what is not, what I can influence in others and what I can't, and what requires the coordination of others to solve. Intellectual and moral implications can be thought through by individuals. Ethical, social, and environmental factors requires the coordination of others to address.
Others will categorize these problems differently. For professional therapists, the question of AI is probably primarily a professional problem, while for me it is social and ethical. For example, some would argue that it is better to give individuals an AI therapist than for them to have no therapist at all. Is it unethical to prioritize and spend resources on an inferior option when you know there are more established options that have better outcomes? Is having an AI therapist truly better than having no therapist at all? Are wire mother and cloth mother good parents?
This conceptual scheme has helped me organize my own thoughts about AI into manageable categories that help me sort problems. Categorizing GenAI technologies and discourse into these buckets has been helpful in conversations with others too by narrowing conversations about AI to common topics that people may identify with. For some people, environmental issues are more immediate than the social ones, even if that is the category that animates me the most. The schema keeps me focused on which domains are relevant to the conversations I am having, without veering off into tangents.
Finally, I think this schema is useful because it reframes all the questions away from a simplistic technological determinism that makes AI seem magical and disconnected from the rest of the world. It refuses only tech problems. Most discussions about AI treat these important problems as problems that can be resolved by just adding more and better tech. Instead, this scheme centers people, their actions, and their social and physical environments.
I think AI is too often discussed as something external that is happening to us that we have little control over. It has pressed in upon so many professions and domains so rapidly that it has become difficult to identify the many distinct trade-offs and say yes or no to any individual one. But that doesn't mean we have zero control, no agency to exert here. When I feel overwhelmed by all the arenas that AI has picked fights in, I will at least get to choose for myself the arena where I will win.