On opting out of Gen AI and other ubiquitous tech trends

Zeitgeist. n. Spirit of the times. From German Zeit (“time”) +‎ Geist (“ghost”)

A couple of months ago I gave myself a moratorium: no more commentating on Gen AI. It was clogging my LinkedIn feed, peers were constantly “innovating” with it, it was attracting all the research funding… and I freaking hated it.

Obviously I can’t not comment on it forever. I’m a knowledge worker, the technology will keep evolving, and I have really, really poor self control. I’ve snuck a few reposts in there, and occasionally justified an article here and there on the grounds that I’d written it before I made the promise to myself. Only one person was bold enough to nudge me about it (thanks Kate)!

This isn’t me lifting the ban… not just yet. This is more a reflection on stepping away, on taking breaths, on ungeisting the zeit.

We all know people who have taken a social media break. Maybe even one or two who took a smartphone break (a friend once replaced her iPhone with a Nokia 3310… she lasted about a month). In our younger years, we might have been subjected to that cruelest of punishments: no TV. My mother frequently banned my brother and I from watching The Simpsons on the basis that it made nasty little wisecrackin’ shits out of us. We weren’t banning the tech so much as the ghost inside the tech. We weren’t banning the tech so much as the people we were becoming under its influence.

This kind of quitting is almost always temporary, because to quit a defining feature of one’s culture is to ostracise oneself from society.

I’m not suggesting it’s easier to quit smoking or drinking. For those with addiction, it’s very, very clearly not. But one of the best steps a quitter can take is to surround themselves with people who are also abstaining — and if you throw out your mobile phone in 2024, you might as well find yourself a hut in the woods too, because like-minded company’s going to be hard to find.

When something is this ubiquitous, we start to fear that if we miss a moment, we might fall irretrievably behind. The AI conversation, particularly on LinkedIn, has been like this for months. Self-styled AI experts have posted countless warnings that those who don’t invest now will be left for dead. Now that the bubble is close to bursting, AI sceptics are suggesting those those who don’t get out fast enough will be ruined. We’re terrified of falling out of step, out of time.

My own need to comment was, I think, driven by a few things.

• Ego. The desire to stay relevant and appear smart.

• Ethics. Increasing concern for the climate impacts of tech based on big data, and the blatant violation of legal and moral rights of authors and artists.

• Self-protection. LLMs are good at producing clean, convincing written copy. That’s one of my core skills, and I don’t want to be replaced.

• Compulsion. I’ve kept fairly informed about generative machine learning developments since about 2019. When someone posts something I know is wrong, it just itches.

But after a while, engaging in critique becomes less and less helpful — especially for women, for whom “nagging” basically constitutes “saying something twice”. A lot of people are defensive about their own use, and in places like LinkedIn, even more are furious when their sales pitches get disrupted. This is how vegans feel, I think. What a rough way to live. I wasn’t getting anywhere and I wasn’t enjoying thinking about it.

So, I asked for help to step back, to exorcise this particular zeitgeist. I’m not electively using Gen AI and if you ask why I’ll give you a short, clear answer — otherwise I’ll just continue quietly, for now.

I hope it gets better. I hope it gets safer. I hope we don’t hand the entire planet over to just seven for-profit corporations. Machine learning technologies are here to stay, but I believe the current generation of LLMs are not. And for now, I’ll leave it there.