What I notice most in the AI conversation is that the so called leaders in this revolution cannot clearly articulate the destination we are going to end up at. There is no clear vision from them while others are noting possible apocalyptic ones. It’s like those who are starting to drive the bus just want to start driving and hope we end up somewhere better. The scary part for me is that they really might not care because they have a perspective that their wealth, interest and power will keep them from suffering the same harms as the rest of us.
I call it the Frankenstein Syndrome. These guys, like Victor Frankenstein think they can create life from corpses, or make computer software that far outpaces the human brain, etc. and when they achieve it, the monster kills everything they love, including them.
I’m living with secondary progressive Multiple Sclerosis, and AI has changed how I think about access.
MS damaged my dominant hand. I used to be a professional illustrator. Then illness changed my body, and for a long time I thought that part of me was mostly gone.
That is where AI became interesting to me.
Not as a magic trick.
Not as a replacement for human creativity.
As a workaround.
AI-assisted tools helped me make a graphic memoir about living with MS. The tool did not have the experience. The tool did not live the story. The tool did not know what it felt like to lose your hand, your leg, your job, your old identity, and then try to build something honest out of the wreckage.
That part was mine.
The memory was mine.
The choices were mine.
The edits were mine.
The final judgment was mine.
But AI helped lower a wall my body had put in front of me.
That is the part of the AI conversation I wish more people talked about.
Yes, there are real concerns about replacement, fraud, job loss, and cheap slop. I get that. I do not think those concerns are fake.
But for disabled people, AI can also be accessibility infrastructure.
It can help someone write when their hands do not work.
It can help someone organize thoughts when brain fog is brutal.
It can help someone speak, draw, communicate, or participate when the old routes are gone.
For me, AI did not replace my voice.
It helped me get my voice back into the world.
I made the graphic memoir available here, if anyone wants to see what that kind of AI-assisted accessibility workflow can produce:
hello miguel - thank you for your comments about how AI is a tool/resource for equity and inclusion. I'm a retired professor at a Canadian university and working with a doctoral student who has used AI as an editor. She experienced a breakdown which impacted her cognitive capabilities. She has recovered by AI became an important partner in her dissertation journey. WE are now navigating the higher education culture where there are significant differences in the role of AI. And I've not found much on the AI's contribution to creating a path for sharing your voice. I will have a look at your graphic story. well done you. shauna
That phrase — “creating a path for sharing your voice” — is exactly it.
That is the part of the AI conversation I keep coming back to. The concerns are real, especially around education and authorship, but for some disabled people these tools can also become a bridge back into participation.
For me, it was not about replacing the work. It was about finding a way to keep making the work after MS changed what my body could do.
Miguel, I thank you for sharing your journey with AI and how it assisted your quality of life. I’ve been thinking how AI could improve and enhance people’s lives without totally overtaking their humanity. Medical research needs a spark, a boast to advance people’s lives without creating robot like humans! No feeling, thinking or imagination! Wishing you the best!
thank you for putting this forward. Technology has been a boon to many folks with disabilities and that aspect should definitely be brought into the conversation. I think it's great that you have found a way to express what is important to you. I am curious as to what you see as an added bonus of using AI compared to the technology that has already been available?
For me, the difference is that older accessibility tools helped me operate the computer, but AI helped me actually complete creative work again.
Dictation, voice control, enlarged screens, keyboards, tablets, Photoshop, and other tools all helped in different ways. I still had to do a lot of hands-on work: copying, pasting, scaling, shading, arranging panels, placing elements, and making design decisions.
But my right hand has a lot of finger curl from MS. At one point I had to make a glove with sticks inside it just to keep my fingers from accidentally hitting buttons, so I could isolate my index finger enough to work. That is the kind of problem I was dealing with.
The harder issue was not only access to the computer.
It was creative production.
I could still see the story. I could still understand the panel flow. I could still know what I wanted emotionally and visually. But the physical act of drawing, refining, rewriting, arranging, and finishing everything the old way had become much harder.
AI-assisted tools helped bridge that gap.
They let me take rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, dictated notes, and my own edits, and push them closer to finished panels and finished writing. I was still making the decisions. I was still shaping the story. I still had to reject things that looked wrong, too generic, or too “AI.” But the tool gave me a way to keep building when my body could no longer handle the full old process.
That was also true for the writing side. AI helped me riff, organize, clean up dictated material, and revise more easily than trying to wrestle everything through Word or Pages alone.
And even with all that help, this was not fast or effortless. The graphic memoir is 30 pages, and it took me about a year and a half to make because I could only work in limited windows, usually a few focused hours on the days my body let me.
So the added bonus, for me, was not just convenience.
It was scale and completion.
It helped me finish a graphic memoir I probably could not have finished the traditional way anymore.
That is where AI felt different from the assistive technology I had used before.
thanks! I read your memoir, and I can see that it took a good amount of time and effort. I appreciate your thorough answer. Obviously I don't really know what the AI tools are, and I am loathe to use them because I don't want to promote casual usage. Again, I am so glad that there are positive aspects to this, and appreciate you putting it out into this conversation. I think your story will be an inspiration to many.
Thank you, Deborah. I really appreciate that. ‘Very human journey’ is exactly what I hoped would come through. MS changed how I could make the work, but the story itself came straight from lived experience.
Thank you, Miquel, for sharing your wonderful book and including your process at the end of it. It's vital that we acknowledge how AI-assistance is an important aspect of the technology. Your creative courage to create a new life other than the one you expected is inspiring. It's also vital to address the many ways AI is prompting us to reflect on what it means to be human, how to handle the complexity of it all.
Just . . . please try to nudge it toward writing more like a human being, could you? It's disheartening to hear its voice in place of yours. It could make some wonder whether AI invented you to advertise itself.
Thank you, Annie. I hear that concern, and honestly, I share it in a lot of cases.
But with my book, that is not what happened.
This was not a prompt-and-out-came-a-book situation. I wrote the story. I built the page flow. I made the panel decisions. I placed the word balloons. I edited the script. I fought hard to keep the line style and visual language close to mine, not some generic AI look.
AI helped me turn rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, and dictated material into finished panels because MS has damaged my hands and made the old way of working much harder.
So yes, I agree that AI can flatten human voice when people let it take over.
But for me, the point was the opposite.
It helped me keep my voice in the work when my body made the old route harder.
No worries at all, Annie. I understand the concern completely.
This whole area is messy, and I think the distinction matters: AI can absolutely flatten people’s voices when it takes over, but it can also help disabled people keep participating when the old tools stop working.
My greatest concern about AI at the moment is the environmental devastation. Living as I do in New Mexico - a state that is already in a drought emergency - a state that is a desert in even the best of years - I worry deeply about the fact that so many Data Centers are planned for areas that are already suffering from lack of water . Data Centers need HUGE amounts of water. Where will it come from? "Water is life," we say here -- "Agua es la vida". So, now what? Will people have access to clean, potable water? What about farmers? Locally, people are fighting back mightily. But it is difficult to fight billion dollar corporations and their armies of lawyers who wake every morning with dollar signs dancing in their heads. This needs to be a national conversation. States that are poor and rural are easy targets for private equity firms who come in with promises of jobs and histories of destroying the industries they run. How will populations survive when wells go dry? When municipal water systems fail? Where will people go? What happens to agriculture when the Data Centers speed the arrival of a new Dust Bowl? So, as much as I'm concerned about the impact of AI on verifiable information and on my lifelong livelihood as a writer, I am much more focused on Data Centers and whether or not whole populations --and the land we love - will be at risk.
My locality is Virginia, but same concerns here. They steal all our farmland and our water, and we have to pay for the construction of these monstrosities? Bullshit.
The data centers are a problem with the online ecosystem as a whole. The crypto boom, online marketplaces, the move to streaming, AWS, etc have all lead to an increase in the need for data centers. It’s a problem.
Not that you were saying this, but most online discourse is one person berating another person online for using AI. But, nearly every industry has moved to include some AI in its workflows. imo, the solution (or a solution) requires meaningful regulation and protections for people and the environment, restrictions on new data center expansion, etc… if we as a society let the big corporations replace swaths of their workforce with AI without leveraging it ourselves as entrepreneurs in the marketplace, that leads to an equally horrific hellscape.
The reality is that there are very few if any good outcomes here for humanity.
I'm an AI refusenik. I'm old (got Trump beat by a few months), and have a very modest Greatest Generation nest egg (from parents who lived to 97 and 100, bless them), so I can afford to be a refusenik for my last few years on this hell planet (once such a beautiful world).
I'm not afraid of AI, I'm repulsed by it. I'm a writer and editor so I can smell it a mile away. I do not want to talk to a machine. I do not want to read or hear from a machine. I do not want the struggle of thinking and writing lifted off me—that's what makes the breakthroughs, if any, so thrilling (at the price of the frustration and despair—we need to toughen up against those things, like our immune systems need to train on dirt).
There is one thing I have used it for a few times, and that is to try to make a political meme. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned, and it's not even very good at that. I lose patience quickly—can't be bothered to tickle it with endlessly refined prompts.
As a retired academic, I worry about kids in middle and high school producing homework that's done by AI. The problem is that they are pleased with the product, thinking it's smart, creative and factually accurate, with so little work on their part. But they are not learning to think creatively on their own. These are the people who will grow up to be our doctors, the problem solvers in whatever line of work they enter. What will the world be like inhabited by people who can't make smart choices, who can't analyze a problem or situation, who are always looking for the easy way out?
Environmental considerations are clearly the most important, but feel discouraging to address.
I went to a top public high school and top public university in a select program. The problem is that the system doesn't reward good work product for its own sake, and for most 'future doctors' its all about gaming grades and gaming club admissions. The 'future doctors' are learning to think creatively on their own and learn from their peers to optimize the metrics that admission and hiring systems reward. Who do we care about - the elite industry problem solvers? Even pre-AI writing education in public institutions was abysmal. If I have kids writing tutoring is something I'd think about or essays for pocket money. The world will be inhabited by people looking for an easy way out because they are getting squeezed by around the clock work demands for deflating buying power salaries and they are exhausted. What are these good kids who can produce pen to paper smart, creative homework supposed to do? Work directly or indirectly for PE or for entities funded by PE workers' largesse? I think AI is just making visible dynamics that were already in place.
I would definitely have used AI for homework. I was the student that would ace all the tests but hated the tedium of homework, so AI would have definitely been a crutch for me. I can see how this will be a giant issue.
Maybe the way kids learn is going to have to change? Like, in class learning will be more important than homework, where you can control the environment. Some way to shift with the reality of what AI is challenging us with?
I agree that the way kids (and adults, for that matter) learn needs to change and I think AI is one tool and one reason for that. Maybe AI doing mundane tasks leaves more time and an opportunity to teach critical thinking, or to practice creativity. Every new technology or innovation requires adaptation, and humans are good at that. This is not to minimize the need for guardrails and the need to address the data center issue; those are real and require systemic and policy rules.
A quick off the cuff response: as a recent NYTimes article on an AI High School noted, a lot of what is being labelled as "AI" has been around for a while and... this is the key takeaway: the parents loved the TEACHERS at the school more than they loved the TECHNOLOGY at the school. As long as humans have agency over the technology, there is nothing to fear...
That said, there IS something to fear about AI... for example, it is not hard to imagine a search engine being captured and marketed widely by MAGA and presenting the "World-according-to-Project-2025" as truth and omitting everything else, sort of a combination of Truth Social and Google... and who might underwrite such a search engine? I'll let readers' imaginations take it from here....
I recently rewatched “Idiocracy” after seeing a photo of the UFC cage going up on the White House Lawn next to the rubble of the east wing. AI was not even a societal concern when that movie was made but it nailed the apocalyptic consequences of ALL aspects of society being controlled by a few companies. My biggest concern is that we are sliding into complacency about the increased reliance on technologies we have no control over.
As an environmental journalist in the desert Southwest, I have a big problem with the environmental justice aspects of AI development. I am less concerned about water use than I used to be, given that AI’s water use is still a fraction of a percent of the amount of water it takes to maintain our current consumption of feedlot livestock for meat and dairy. That said, wastewater from these things is going to introduce biocides and other industrial chemicals into rivers, streams, or aquifers. The energy consumption for training AIs is a serious concern, likely to undo any gains we’ve made in reducing our carbon consumption. Natural gas or diesel backup generators are a huge threat to Frontline communities. And then there’s the increasing evidence that using AI for replacing cognitive tasks, erodes your ability to do those cognitive tasks on your own.
All that said, and it’s a lot, I am almost as disturbed by the rise of AI shaming, in which people take their legitimate concerns about AI and use them to dump on individuals or small nonprofits for using AI to do things like create social media, generate transcripts, and the like. Despite the newness of the technology, we are, at least for the time being, embedded in a network of systems that use AI, whether we like it or not. It would make orders of magnitude more sense to shame individuals or small organizations for using internal combustion engines to get people to events or whatever, given that the environmental impact of a typical query to ChatGPT is equivalent to driving your Prius about 10 feet. But somehow we don’t see gasoline shaming on social media. AI shaming won’t keep people from using AI, but it will keep people from being transparent about it. And that transparency is something we are absolutely going to need if we really want to content with a disinformation potential that inheres in AI.
What's missing from a lot of the conversation about AI is the cost--not in dollars, although I do think AI companies are like drug dealers offering AI up for little to nothing to get us all hooked, and then they can charge any price they like. But the really scary cost is in resources--electricity and water. The U.N. recently produced a report indicating that the world is already facing a severe water crisis. A typical data center requires around 500,000 gallons of water a day to operate. And many data centers are going up in the most water-scarce regions of the country: West Texas, Arizona, Nevada. This is clearly unsustainable and insane. What good will AI be when we have no water to drink or to irrigate crops? How far are we going to go down this path? The tech companies are building data centers as fast as they can because they know people are starting to catch on to just how destructive these facilities are and are starting to object to them being built in their communities. Which means they are going to be built in marginalized communities that do not have the power to stop them.
I do not believe that we can have a serious conversation about AI without discussing capitalism. Our current billionaire oligarchy is led by digital monopolies centered around Stanford University's Silicon Valley. AI will only increase their power and corruption unless China stops them. However, capitalism always empowers the 1%, more accurately the 0.01%. James Madison and Hamilton ensured that the Constitution would protect the rich over the working class and slaves [see Jeffrey Winters' book The Blind Spot]. From Southern slave owners to JD Rockefeller to 1890s Robber Barons to Oli Oligarchs to our current Tech Bros, money talks.
As a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, I believe that we must break this chain of oppression.
At this moment, I personally, am avoiding anything that I know is AI generated. Like so much that creates a profit for the wealthy, we forge ahead with product without taking the time to carefully assess the impact and whether that impact is harmful or how it could be beneficial - we're just about making money. I resent the fact that big tech seems to be selling this to us as 'inevitable' and driven by the public desire for this. We have NOT had a national conversation about this, and in the US I'm not sure what that even entails - we don't seem to have conversations, we have big money that pushes things on us. The impact on the lives of average folk has been disregarded, and I feel resentful that many, if not all, of our concerns are not being addressed - big tech/oligarchy doesn't seem to care about the repercussions to the planet, to our livelihoods, to our quality of life. I don't think that creating a system where everyone shares in the profits is a good answer in light of the cost to our natural resources. I'd rather have drinking water, clean air, and real live connection to human and nonhuman life forms. We have gone sadly awry in our worship of money. I have an image of us: drugged, lying in the poppy field of convenience and consumerism, while the wicked witch of the billionaires is flying over us telling us to surrender. I would like us to wake up from this dream and turn toward what is truly life sustaining.
The more I sit with this, the more I think the argument cannot simply be “AI is good” or “AI is bad.”
That frame is too small.
AI can be harmful. It can flatten human work, replace people, steal from artists, burn resources, and make powerful people even more powerful.
But AI can also be useful. For someone like me, living with secondary progressive MS, it can become an accessibility tool. It helped me keep creating after my hands stopped working the way they used to.
So the real question, to me, is not whether AI itself is good or bad.
The real question is: who gets to control it, and who pays the price?
If we leave this entirely in the hands of billionaires, corporations, and profit incentives, then we already know where it goes. Workers become disposable. Artists become raw material. Disabled people become an afterthought. The environment becomes a cost of doing business. The human being gets measured only by whether they are useful to growth.
We have seen this movie before. The tools change. The pattern does not.
That is why regulation matters. Not vague “please be ethical” language. Actual laws with teeth. Labour protection. Copyright protection. Environmental rules. Disability access. Transparency. Accountability.
AI helped me because I am disabled.
That does not mean I trust corporations to decide what AI should become.
I've just waded through the entire New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, and I'm not sure that I understand much more than when I began it because the whole thing seems so abstract to me. But what I wonder about most concerns the actual fate of affected people. What is the plan for all of the displaced people? I can't help but look at the proliferation of detention centers and the huge funding for ICE as being not about immigration, except as a political red herring, but as a possible solution for where to put the disenfranchised.
My continuing concern is omitting context in discussions about AI, or any major phenomenon. One context is technology in general and gradual disempowerment (see Forster 1909 The Machine Stops). Another is planetary boundaries (resource depletion, e.g.). AI is a threat multiplier at best, as well as a unique threat of its own (see military applications, e.g.). Saying it will cure cancer is complete BS, given how cancer research actually works (there are discussions of this elsewhere). In any case, the existential risks far outweigh potential benefits.
I am waiting for the companies who are building AI plants to include recycling the water as part of their increase of use on a limited resource that is under profound strain already. Then there is the strain on our electric grids. And all this so we can play or put people out of work as do it ourselvers?
I feel we’ve lost our way. What is the point of art unless it is one human speaking to another? Ditto journalism. What is the point of living if it isn’t about each individual learning, striving, interacting, loving? Do I need to say with one another?
It has been so obvious that we should not have billionaires, they should have to pay their workers until they are not billionaires.
Instead we are giving a few men machines that we may not be able to turn off when they decide to kill us all or rule us all. Am I going too far?
I think not. We desperately need regulation. But our president is too busy starting wars to avoid us reckoning with his Epstein connections. They must be pretty terrible. Or he’s finding ways to make money off of us, off the billionaires, other countries. I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it.
Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world and we can’t turn them off. Is that too far fetched? And we are hastening the end with unregulated AI.
Perhaps I am too apocalyptic but I am not engaging with AI directly by choice until it is regulated.
I agree with your stated concerns. It reminds me of the slippery slope we’ve been sliding down with Trump 2.0. We second guess the rise of authoritarianism before our eyes because it feels too “apocalyptic” . But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
1) "I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it."
-It honestly made me laugh, much needed these days.
2) "Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world".
-I don't think that this is at all too far a stretch. Not so much "decide" as an intrinsic algorithmic limitation, a flaw of the technology in which too much faith is placed.
The world is already replete with examples of the destructive side effects of industrial technology. Information technology is no different. But I read something recently that rang true: no prior technology that raised caution has ever been stopped from development once this possibility was reached. We seem to always rush headlong into it.
It has been suggested that this in itself is something on the order of a species flaw: we just seem to be lousy at long-term considerations, and eager for immediate gains, particularly by those in positions of privilege and power who stand to gain the most. And every society has an elite.
What I notice most in the AI conversation is that the so called leaders in this revolution cannot clearly articulate the destination we are going to end up at. There is no clear vision from them while others are noting possible apocalyptic ones. It’s like those who are starting to drive the bus just want to start driving and hope we end up somewhere better. The scary part for me is that they really might not care because they have a perspective that their wealth, interest and power will keep them from suffering the same harms as the rest of us.
Well said, Kevin. I think a lot of people feel this viscerally.
I call it the Frankenstein Syndrome. These guys, like Victor Frankenstein think they can create life from corpses, or make computer software that far outpaces the human brain, etc. and when they achieve it, the monster kills everything they love, including them.
I’m living with secondary progressive Multiple Sclerosis, and AI has changed how I think about access.
MS damaged my dominant hand. I used to be a professional illustrator. Then illness changed my body, and for a long time I thought that part of me was mostly gone.
That is where AI became interesting to me.
Not as a magic trick.
Not as a replacement for human creativity.
As a workaround.
AI-assisted tools helped me make a graphic memoir about living with MS. The tool did not have the experience. The tool did not live the story. The tool did not know what it felt like to lose your hand, your leg, your job, your old identity, and then try to build something honest out of the wreckage.
That part was mine.
The memory was mine.
The choices were mine.
The edits were mine.
The final judgment was mine.
But AI helped lower a wall my body had put in front of me.
That is the part of the AI conversation I wish more people talked about.
Yes, there are real concerns about replacement, fraud, job loss, and cheap slop. I get that. I do not think those concerns are fake.
But for disabled people, AI can also be accessibility infrastructure.
It can help someone write when their hands do not work.
It can help someone organize thoughts when brain fog is brutal.
It can help someone speak, draw, communicate, or participate when the old routes are gone.
For me, AI did not replace my voice.
It helped me get my voice back into the world.
I made the graphic memoir available here, if anyone wants to see what that kind of AI-assisted accessibility workflow can produce:
https://morethanms.miguelallamani.com/
hello miguel - thank you for your comments about how AI is a tool/resource for equity and inclusion. I'm a retired professor at a Canadian university and working with a doctoral student who has used AI as an editor. She experienced a breakdown which impacted her cognitive capabilities. She has recovered by AI became an important partner in her dissertation journey. WE are now navigating the higher education culture where there are significant differences in the role of AI. And I've not found much on the AI's contribution to creating a path for sharing your voice. I will have a look at your graphic story. well done you. shauna
Thank you, Shauna. I really appreciate this.
That phrase — “creating a path for sharing your voice” — is exactly it.
That is the part of the AI conversation I keep coming back to. The concerns are real, especially around education and authorship, but for some disabled people these tools can also become a bridge back into participation.
For me, it was not about replacing the work. It was about finding a way to keep making the work after MS changed what my body could do.
I hope the graphic story lands with you.
Miguel
Miguel, I thank you for sharing your journey with AI and how it assisted your quality of life. I’ve been thinking how AI could improve and enhance people’s lives without totally overtaking their humanity. Medical research needs a spark, a boast to advance people’s lives without creating robot like humans! No feeling, thinking or imagination! Wishing you the best!
Maisha Omotunde
Amazing! Thanks for your perspective. The memoir is awesome!
☝🏼❤️
thank you for putting this forward. Technology has been a boon to many folks with disabilities and that aspect should definitely be brought into the conversation. I think it's great that you have found a way to express what is important to you. I am curious as to what you see as an added bonus of using AI compared to the technology that has already been available?
Thank you, Kerry. That is a really good question.
For me, the difference is that older accessibility tools helped me operate the computer, but AI helped me actually complete creative work again.
Dictation, voice control, enlarged screens, keyboards, tablets, Photoshop, and other tools all helped in different ways. I still had to do a lot of hands-on work: copying, pasting, scaling, shading, arranging panels, placing elements, and making design decisions.
But my right hand has a lot of finger curl from MS. At one point I had to make a glove with sticks inside it just to keep my fingers from accidentally hitting buttons, so I could isolate my index finger enough to work. That is the kind of problem I was dealing with.
The harder issue was not only access to the computer.
It was creative production.
I could still see the story. I could still understand the panel flow. I could still know what I wanted emotionally and visually. But the physical act of drawing, refining, rewriting, arranging, and finishing everything the old way had become much harder.
AI-assisted tools helped bridge that gap.
They let me take rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, dictated notes, and my own edits, and push them closer to finished panels and finished writing. I was still making the decisions. I was still shaping the story. I still had to reject things that looked wrong, too generic, or too “AI.” But the tool gave me a way to keep building when my body could no longer handle the full old process.
That was also true for the writing side. AI helped me riff, organize, clean up dictated material, and revise more easily than trying to wrestle everything through Word or Pages alone.
And even with all that help, this was not fast or effortless. The graphic memoir is 30 pages, and it took me about a year and a half to make because I could only work in limited windows, usually a few focused hours on the days my body let me.
So the added bonus, for me, was not just convenience.
It was scale and completion.
It helped me finish a graphic memoir I probably could not have finished the traditional way anymore.
That is where AI felt different from the assistive technology I had used before.
thanks! I read your memoir, and I can see that it took a good amount of time and effort. I appreciate your thorough answer. Obviously I don't really know what the AI tools are, and I am loathe to use them because I don't want to promote casual usage. Again, I am so glad that there are positive aspects to this, and appreciate you putting it out into this conversation. I think your story will be an inspiration to many.
☝🏼❤️
Your graphic memoir is wonderful! Thank you for sharing it! Best wishes on this very human journey!
Thank you, Deborah. I really appreciate that. ‘Very human journey’ is exactly what I hoped would come through. MS changed how I could make the work, but the story itself came straight from lived experience.
Thank you, Miquel, for sharing your wonderful book and including your process at the end of it. It's vital that we acknowledge how AI-assistance is an important aspect of the technology. Your creative courage to create a new life other than the one you expected is inspiring. It's also vital to address the many ways AI is prompting us to reflect on what it means to be human, how to handle the complexity of it all.
That's a worthy use of AI, more power to you!
Just . . . please try to nudge it toward writing more like a human being, could you? It's disheartening to hear its voice in place of yours. It could make some wonder whether AI invented you to advertise itself.
Thank you, Annie. I hear that concern, and honestly, I share it in a lot of cases.
But with my book, that is not what happened.
This was not a prompt-and-out-came-a-book situation. I wrote the story. I built the page flow. I made the panel decisions. I placed the word balloons. I edited the script. I fought hard to keep the line style and visual language close to mine, not some generic AI look.
AI helped me turn rough sketches, layouts, visual direction, and dictated material into finished panels because MS has damaged my hands and made the old way of working much harder.
So yes, I agree that AI can flatten human voice when people let it take over.
But for me, the point was the opposite.
It helped me keep my voice in the work when my body made the old route harder.
Miguel
I believe you and I apologize if I seemed to imply otherwise.
No worries at all, Annie. I understand the concern completely.
This whole area is messy, and I think the distinction matters: AI can absolutely flatten people’s voices when it takes over, but it can also help disabled people keep participating when the old tools stop working.
That is the line I’m trying to stay honest about.
Miguel
My greatest concern about AI at the moment is the environmental devastation. Living as I do in New Mexico - a state that is already in a drought emergency - a state that is a desert in even the best of years - I worry deeply about the fact that so many Data Centers are planned for areas that are already suffering from lack of water . Data Centers need HUGE amounts of water. Where will it come from? "Water is life," we say here -- "Agua es la vida". So, now what? Will people have access to clean, potable water? What about farmers? Locally, people are fighting back mightily. But it is difficult to fight billion dollar corporations and their armies of lawyers who wake every morning with dollar signs dancing in their heads. This needs to be a national conversation. States that are poor and rural are easy targets for private equity firms who come in with promises of jobs and histories of destroying the industries they run. How will populations survive when wells go dry? When municipal water systems fail? Where will people go? What happens to agriculture when the Data Centers speed the arrival of a new Dust Bowl? So, as much as I'm concerned about the impact of AI on verifiable information and on my lifelong livelihood as a writer, I am much more focused on Data Centers and whether or not whole populations --and the land we love - will be at risk.
Yes, Heidi. More Perfect Union has done powerful work on this angle. Very important one
My locality is Virginia, but same concerns here. They steal all our farmland and our water, and we have to pay for the construction of these monstrosities? Bullshit.
Heidi, Erin Brockovich is focusing on data centers now: https://www.brockovich.com/. Also, Christopher Armitage has a toolkit for communities fighting data centers: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/the-laws-that-stop-a-data-center?utm_source=direct&r=qjf9i&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer.
The data centers are a problem with the online ecosystem as a whole. The crypto boom, online marketplaces, the move to streaming, AWS, etc have all lead to an increase in the need for data centers. It’s a problem.
Not that you were saying this, but most online discourse is one person berating another person online for using AI. But, nearly every industry has moved to include some AI in its workflows. imo, the solution (or a solution) requires meaningful regulation and protections for people and the environment, restrictions on new data center expansion, etc… if we as a society let the big corporations replace swaths of their workforce with AI without leveraging it ourselves as entrepreneurs in the marketplace, that leads to an equally horrific hellscape.
The reality is that there are very few if any good outcomes here for humanity.
Heidi, I also live in New Mexico (Silver City) and I share your concerns.
This is my biggest concern, too. Well said.
I'm an AI refusenik. I'm old (got Trump beat by a few months), and have a very modest Greatest Generation nest egg (from parents who lived to 97 and 100, bless them), so I can afford to be a refusenik for my last few years on this hell planet (once such a beautiful world).
I'm not afraid of AI, I'm repulsed by it. I'm a writer and editor so I can smell it a mile away. I do not want to talk to a machine. I do not want to read or hear from a machine. I do not want the struggle of thinking and writing lifted off me—that's what makes the breakthroughs, if any, so thrilling (at the price of the frustration and despair—we need to toughen up against those things, like our immune systems need to train on dirt).
There is one thing I have used it for a few times, and that is to try to make a political meme. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned, and it's not even very good at that. I lose patience quickly—can't be bothered to tickle it with endlessly refined prompts.
P.S. I don't want an Oura ring or a health and fitness app, either.
Agreed.
As a retired academic, I worry about kids in middle and high school producing homework that's done by AI. The problem is that they are pleased with the product, thinking it's smart, creative and factually accurate, with so little work on their part. But they are not learning to think creatively on their own. These are the people who will grow up to be our doctors, the problem solvers in whatever line of work they enter. What will the world be like inhabited by people who can't make smart choices, who can't analyze a problem or situation, who are always looking for the easy way out?
I worry about this aspect with my own kids
Environmental considerations are clearly the most important, but feel discouraging to address.
I went to a top public high school and top public university in a select program. The problem is that the system doesn't reward good work product for its own sake, and for most 'future doctors' its all about gaming grades and gaming club admissions. The 'future doctors' are learning to think creatively on their own and learn from their peers to optimize the metrics that admission and hiring systems reward. Who do we care about - the elite industry problem solvers? Even pre-AI writing education in public institutions was abysmal. If I have kids writing tutoring is something I'd think about or essays for pocket money. The world will be inhabited by people looking for an easy way out because they are getting squeezed by around the clock work demands for deflating buying power salaries and they are exhausted. What are these good kids who can produce pen to paper smart, creative homework supposed to do? Work directly or indirectly for PE or for entities funded by PE workers' largesse? I think AI is just making visible dynamics that were already in place.
I would definitely have used AI for homework. I was the student that would ace all the tests but hated the tedium of homework, so AI would have definitely been a crutch for me. I can see how this will be a giant issue.
Maybe the way kids learn is going to have to change? Like, in class learning will be more important than homework, where you can control the environment. Some way to shift with the reality of what AI is challenging us with?
I agree that the way kids (and adults, for that matter) learn needs to change and I think AI is one tool and one reason for that. Maybe AI doing mundane tasks leaves more time and an opportunity to teach critical thinking, or to practice creativity. Every new technology or innovation requires adaptation, and humans are good at that. This is not to minimize the need for guardrails and the need to address the data center issue; those are real and require systemic and policy rules.
A quick off the cuff response: as a recent NYTimes article on an AI High School noted, a lot of what is being labelled as "AI" has been around for a while and... this is the key takeaway: the parents loved the TEACHERS at the school more than they loved the TECHNOLOGY at the school. As long as humans have agency over the technology, there is nothing to fear...
That said, there IS something to fear about AI... for example, it is not hard to imagine a search engine being captured and marketed widely by MAGA and presenting the "World-according-to-Project-2025" as truth and omitting everything else, sort of a combination of Truth Social and Google... and who might underwrite such a search engine? I'll let readers' imaginations take it from here....
I recently rewatched “Idiocracy” after seeing a photo of the UFC cage going up on the White House Lawn next to the rubble of the east wing. AI was not even a societal concern when that movie was made but it nailed the apocalyptic consequences of ALL aspects of society being controlled by a few companies. My biggest concern is that we are sliding into complacency about the increased reliance on technologies we have no control over.
I feel like that movie needs a sequel, because it doesn't even seem like satire or sci fi anymore.
😂😐 true dat!
As an environmental journalist in the desert Southwest, I have a big problem with the environmental justice aspects of AI development. I am less concerned about water use than I used to be, given that AI’s water use is still a fraction of a percent of the amount of water it takes to maintain our current consumption of feedlot livestock for meat and dairy. That said, wastewater from these things is going to introduce biocides and other industrial chemicals into rivers, streams, or aquifers. The energy consumption for training AIs is a serious concern, likely to undo any gains we’ve made in reducing our carbon consumption. Natural gas or diesel backup generators are a huge threat to Frontline communities. And then there’s the increasing evidence that using AI for replacing cognitive tasks, erodes your ability to do those cognitive tasks on your own.
All that said, and it’s a lot, I am almost as disturbed by the rise of AI shaming, in which people take their legitimate concerns about AI and use them to dump on individuals or small nonprofits for using AI to do things like create social media, generate transcripts, and the like. Despite the newness of the technology, we are, at least for the time being, embedded in a network of systems that use AI, whether we like it or not. It would make orders of magnitude more sense to shame individuals or small organizations for using internal combustion engines to get people to events or whatever, given that the environmental impact of a typical query to ChatGPT is equivalent to driving your Prius about 10 feet. But somehow we don’t see gasoline shaming on social media. AI shaming won’t keep people from using AI, but it will keep people from being transparent about it. And that transparency is something we are absolutely going to need if we really want to content with a disinformation potential that inheres in AI.
What's missing from a lot of the conversation about AI is the cost--not in dollars, although I do think AI companies are like drug dealers offering AI up for little to nothing to get us all hooked, and then they can charge any price they like. But the really scary cost is in resources--electricity and water. The U.N. recently produced a report indicating that the world is already facing a severe water crisis. A typical data center requires around 500,000 gallons of water a day to operate. And many data centers are going up in the most water-scarce regions of the country: West Texas, Arizona, Nevada. This is clearly unsustainable and insane. What good will AI be when we have no water to drink or to irrigate crops? How far are we going to go down this path? The tech companies are building data centers as fast as they can because they know people are starting to catch on to just how destructive these facilities are and are starting to object to them being built in their communities. Which means they are going to be built in marginalized communities that do not have the power to stop them.
I do not believe that we can have a serious conversation about AI without discussing capitalism. Our current billionaire oligarchy is led by digital monopolies centered around Stanford University's Silicon Valley. AI will only increase their power and corruption unless China stops them. However, capitalism always empowers the 1%, more accurately the 0.01%. James Madison and Hamilton ensured that the Constitution would protect the rich over the working class and slaves [see Jeffrey Winters' book The Blind Spot]. From Southern slave owners to JD Rockefeller to 1890s Robber Barons to Oli Oligarchs to our current Tech Bros, money talks.
As a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialist of America, I believe that we must break this chain of oppression.
👏👏👏
At this moment, I personally, am avoiding anything that I know is AI generated. Like so much that creates a profit for the wealthy, we forge ahead with product without taking the time to carefully assess the impact and whether that impact is harmful or how it could be beneficial - we're just about making money. I resent the fact that big tech seems to be selling this to us as 'inevitable' and driven by the public desire for this. We have NOT had a national conversation about this, and in the US I'm not sure what that even entails - we don't seem to have conversations, we have big money that pushes things on us. The impact on the lives of average folk has been disregarded, and I feel resentful that many, if not all, of our concerns are not being addressed - big tech/oligarchy doesn't seem to care about the repercussions to the planet, to our livelihoods, to our quality of life. I don't think that creating a system where everyone shares in the profits is a good answer in light of the cost to our natural resources. I'd rather have drinking water, clean air, and real live connection to human and nonhuman life forms. We have gone sadly awry in our worship of money. I have an image of us: drugged, lying in the poppy field of convenience and consumerism, while the wicked witch of the billionaires is flying over us telling us to surrender. I would like us to wake up from this dream and turn toward what is truly life sustaining.
The more I sit with this, the more I think the argument cannot simply be “AI is good” or “AI is bad.”
That frame is too small.
AI can be harmful. It can flatten human work, replace people, steal from artists, burn resources, and make powerful people even more powerful.
But AI can also be useful. For someone like me, living with secondary progressive MS, it can become an accessibility tool. It helped me keep creating after my hands stopped working the way they used to.
So the real question, to me, is not whether AI itself is good or bad.
The real question is: who gets to control it, and who pays the price?
If we leave this entirely in the hands of billionaires, corporations, and profit incentives, then we already know where it goes. Workers become disposable. Artists become raw material. Disabled people become an afterthought. The environment becomes a cost of doing business. The human being gets measured only by whether they are useful to growth.
We have seen this movie before. The tools change. The pattern does not.
That is why regulation matters. Not vague “please be ethical” language. Actual laws with teeth. Labour protection. Copyright protection. Environmental rules. Disability access. Transparency. Accountability.
AI helped me because I am disabled.
That does not mean I trust corporations to decide what AI should become.
Keep the access.
Regulate the extraction.
Protect the human.
I've just waded through the entire New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow, and I'm not sure that I understand much more than when I began it because the whole thing seems so abstract to me. But what I wonder about most concerns the actual fate of affected people. What is the plan for all of the displaced people? I can't help but look at the proliferation of detention centers and the huge funding for ICE as being not about immigration, except as a political red herring, but as a possible solution for where to put the disenfranchised.
My continuing concern is omitting context in discussions about AI, or any major phenomenon. One context is technology in general and gradual disempowerment (see Forster 1909 The Machine Stops). Another is planetary boundaries (resource depletion, e.g.). AI is a threat multiplier at best, as well as a unique threat of its own (see military applications, e.g.). Saying it will cure cancer is complete BS, given how cancer research actually works (there are discussions of this elsewhere). In any case, the existential risks far outweigh potential benefits.
It's Elyssium for them. District 9 for us. If you don't know what I'm talking about now is a good time to catch up on some dystopic science fiction...
I am waiting for the companies who are building AI plants to include recycling the water as part of their increase of use on a limited resource that is under profound strain already. Then there is the strain on our electric grids. And all this so we can play or put people out of work as do it ourselvers?
I feel we’ve lost our way. What is the point of art unless it is one human speaking to another? Ditto journalism. What is the point of living if it isn’t about each individual learning, striving, interacting, loving? Do I need to say with one another?
It has been so obvious that we should not have billionaires, they should have to pay their workers until they are not billionaires.
Instead we are giving a few men machines that we may not be able to turn off when they decide to kill us all or rule us all. Am I going too far?
I think not. We desperately need regulation. But our president is too busy starting wars to avoid us reckoning with his Epstein connections. They must be pretty terrible. Or he’s finding ways to make money off of us, off the billionaires, other countries. I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it.
Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world and we can’t turn them off. Is that too far fetched? And we are hastening the end with unregulated AI.
Perhaps I am too apocalyptic but I am not engaging with AI directly by choice until it is regulated.
I agree with your stated concerns. It reminds me of the slippery slope we’ve been sliding down with Trump 2.0. We second guess the rise of authoritarianism before our eyes because it feels too “apocalyptic” . But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
Thank you, for:
1) "I honestly think T would be happy if the world ended as long as he’d caused it."
-It honestly made me laugh, much needed these days.
2) "Then there is the possibility that AI will get to a place militarily where the machines decide to end the world".
-I don't think that this is at all too far a stretch. Not so much "decide" as an intrinsic algorithmic limitation, a flaw of the technology in which too much faith is placed.
The world is already replete with examples of the destructive side effects of industrial technology. Information technology is no different. But I read something recently that rang true: no prior technology that raised caution has ever been stopped from development once this possibility was reached. We seem to always rush headlong into it.
It has been suggested that this in itself is something on the order of a species flaw: we just seem to be lousy at long-term considerations, and eager for immediate gains, particularly by those in positions of privilege and power who stand to gain the most. And every society has an elite.