Just riffs, need to expand (8/18):
It’s increasingly clear that that if we are to incorporate AI-driven media systems (i.e. Facebook Newsfeeds), we are charged to ascribe heightened value to editorial oversight; when you are serving an audience of so many people, it is simply imperative that even a platform such as Facebook must absorb some of the cost of its role in society.
This is not unlike how, in this age of political decay and institutional distrust, brands and corporations are often charged to take on greater social responsibilities. As the roles of our historic institutions are increasingly under threat, some are hopeful that tech companies (and corporations more broadly) can step up to a societal challenge and act in a socially activist or otherwise responsible manner.
But inasmuch as our current moment provokes outrage, it also engenders complacency by way of escapist media and an overabundance of content production — making the expansive role of the corporate surveillance economy even more worrisome. On a deeper level though, this conflict between platforms, social responsibilities and their commercial interests can be understood as reflective of a larger societal shift in how artificial intelligence is evolving.
There’s no longer just a binary cultural belief that AI is going to either save us or destroy us. This man-versus-machine dichotomy is just how we’re just to conceiving of AI—it’s how we’ve been conditioned to think about the topic by Hollywood and the culture industries, in fact—but it’s unhelpful in grappling with the legitimate societal questions that AI is bringing to bear with increasing velocity.