I have found what is, to me, an unassailable defense of AI.
Always allowing for the fact that the fuckers who make AI are soulless thieves, and that AI shouldn’t be built on the backs of everyone else’s unintentionally free labor.
Anyway. AI is outstanding for this particular thing, for sure:
The particular thing
I’m on the autism spectrum. There are things that take me a lot of work to understand, and that’s if I can ever get to the “right” conclusion.
There was a weird incident here at my shared workspace. I described the weird incident to an AI bot and asked it to analyze the situation.
The situation, in brief
Entitled guy has weird tone and posture, making the receptionists (and, via secondhand smoke, me) very, very uncomfortable.
What I knew
- He was being a dick.
- It was making all 3 of us seriously uncomfortable, and we should all listen to that discomfort.
- He was a CUSTOMER, intimidating SERVICE WORKERS at their JOB. Dickless.
What I didn’t know
I described this to Gemini, and it came back with several things that I might have been feeling, but hadn’t yet thought of or understood explicitly:
- The man’s request was actually “a demand that is owed to him”, in his eyes.
- Not getting it immediately was a “narcissistic injury”, a blow to his ego.
- “The posture, tone, and barely-contained aggression are tools of intimidation. He is creating a hostile environment to make the receptionists so uncomfortable that they will capitulate just to end the confrontation.”
- “[Our brains] were picking up on non-verbal cues that signal danger.”
- This workspace “is a professional, shared space governed by unspoken rules of conduct. … The man’s behavior was a flagrant violation of this social contract, which is why it was so jarring to you and others.”
Lessons I learned
First: I can use AI to help me spot some things that I tend to miss.
Second: I can explicitly add certain things to my “good” and “bad” judgement processes. Namely,
- remember power dynamics.
- remember gender dynamics.
- remember what is appropriate to the outside situation (in this case, being at a fucking office space).
- It’s not that a person doesn’t understand the effects of their behavior; they’re often doing this shit on purpose, at least on some level. (It is my default assumption, for some damn reason, that people are usually acting from ignorance instead of malice.)
- Do any of these words fit? “Aggression, intimidation, hostile, unreasonable”.
So: a positive use case for AI.