"This takes us to the core problem with today’s generative AI. It doesn’t just mirror the market’s operating principles; it embodies its ethos. This isn’t surprising, given that these services are dominated by tech giants that treat users as consumers above all. Why would OpenAI, or any other AI service, encourage me to send fewer queries to their servers or reuse the responses others have already received when building my app? Doing so would undermine their business model, even if it might be better from a social or political (never mind ecological) perspective. Instead, OpenAI’s API charges me—and emits a nontrivial amount of carbon emissions—even to tell me that London is the capital of the UK or that there are one thousand grams in a kilogram.

For all the ways tools like ChatGPT contribute to ecological reason, then, they also undermine it at a deeper level—primarily by framing our activities around the identity of isolated, possibly alienated, postmodern consumers. When we use these tools to solve problems, we’re not like Storm’s carefree flâneur, open to anything; we’re more like entrepreneurs seeking arbitrage opportunities within a predefined, profit-oriented grid. While eolithic bricolage can happen under these conditions, the whole setup constrains the full potential and play of ecological reason.

Here too, ChatGPT resembles the Coordinator, much like our own capitalist postmodernity still resembles the welfare-warfare modernity that came before it. While the Coordinator enhanced the exercise of instrumental reason by the Organization Man, ChatGPT lets today’s neoliberal subject—part consumer, part entrepreneur—glimpse and even flirt, however briefly, with ecological reason. The apparent increase in human freedom conceals a deeper unfreedom; behind both stands the Efficiency Lobby, still in control. This is why our emancipation through such powerful technologies feels so truncated."

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai-we-deserve/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Neoliberalism #Capitalism