While AI products are still largely discussed as an imminent future transformation, they are increasingly pitched as new and immediate solutions to problems both profound and mundane. With the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022, a new wave of AI hype has hit the tech sector, transforming not only which technologies are integrated into our products and services, but also the rate at which any kind of algorithmic feature is described as AI. In this chapter, we explore so-called AI integrations in everyday life and discuss the unreported consequences or increasing acceptance of and reliance on projects which depend on labor exploitation, user exploitation, and environmental exploitation to function. I describe how entrepreneurial culture has become an elite gambling scheme—any proposed products or services promised by startups are often a cover for extracting user data which is then sold as a speculative revenue prospect. The promised product, sometimes medical devices which users have become dependent on, is then abandoned and the resources rolled into some other venture. Using a local example, I then explore the environmental cost of such data gambits. Are we willing to bet it all on a project which has repeatedly broken its promises?

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The Broken Promises of AI in Everyday Life

  • Rua M. Williams

摘要

While AI products are still largely discussed as an imminent future transformation, they are increasingly pitched as new and immediate solutions to problems both profound and mundane. With the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022, a new wave of AI hype has hit the tech sector, transforming not only which technologies are integrated into our products and services, but also the rate at which any kind of algorithmic feature is described as AI. In this chapter, we explore so-called AI integrations in everyday life and discuss the unreported consequences or increasing acceptance of and reliance on projects which depend on labor exploitation, user exploitation, and environmental exploitation to function. I describe how entrepreneurial culture has become an elite gambling scheme—any proposed products or services promised by startups are often a cover for extracting user data which is then sold as a speculative revenue prospect. The promised product, sometimes medical devices which users have become dependent on, is then abandoned and the resources rolled into some other venture. Using a local example, I then explore the environmental cost of such data gambits. Are we willing to bet it all on a project which has repeatedly broken its promises?