V1 [April 2024]

🏢 Beyond corporate-first AI imaginaries

Throughout 2023, we in the AIxDESIGN community found ourselves increasingly disillusioned with the prevailing discourse and narratives around AI.

The central narratives around emerging AI technologies today are being shaped by Big Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta – with for-profit products such as ChatGPT dominating our idea of what this technology is, can be, and most likely will be in the future. In some ways, “Silicon Valley's most powerful monopoly may be how we perceive technology.”

GROWTH

These dominant AI narratives and development are heavily influenced by the interests of big tech companies - primarily growth, profit, and stakeholder value, the usual capitalist objectives. It is sometimes said that “the problem with AI is the problem with capitalism”.

IMG: Ben Grosser's redaction poetry version of Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto

TESCREAL

Beyond that, there’s the underlying ideologies and beliefs of people leading and funding said developments. Their taglines of “AI to benefit all of humanity” are intended to sway the public in its favor with ideas of ‘a promised land’ as this VOX article sharply notes sounds a lot like ‘religion, repackaged’. A recent paper by Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres bundles some of the underlying ideologies driving the agenda towards AGI (artificial general intelligence) in particular into the TESCREAL acronym, clearly labelling these beliefs and tracing their origins back.