Unfortunately, i think too many people adopt a judgemental stance towards specific technologies without even boring to fully understand what they really despise in them. In that sense, more often than not, human beings end up very tribalistic.
"From this perspective, the question is not a binary “AI or not AI,” but how it has been shifting what we call writing.
Similar to Marwick, I find the idea of removing AI from our lives to be futile. This doesn’t buy into the “hype” of AI companies; it’s simply a realistic perspective. When I look at statistics on undergraduates’ use of AI writing tools, I see that some 80–90% use them regularly. What undergraduates are acclimated to now will become the reality for graduate students in a few more years. Those graduate students will become researchers, professors, and instructors. Whatever happens next, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. (I suppose I could wag my finger, but there are only so many paid finger-wagging speaking gigs for critical scholars.)
Academics should certainly remain politically active. Personally, I find recent tech companies' actions intrusive and depressing. Data centers have emerged as a crucial local issue in the mid-term elections. To take a normative stance, we should be able to choose how and when we use AI in our personal lives and professional practice. But returning to Marwick, she drew attention back to harm reduction, which she argued was not synonymous with technological rejection.
Simply choosing not to use AI personally won’t help us understand the new roles it plays in society."
https://scholarintheloop.substack.com/p/the-vivid-tale-of-velvet-vale
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