Speedrunning Surveillance Capitalism
- Karl Johansson
- för 3 dagar sedan
- 3 min läsning
Sam Altman reinvents Mark Zuckerberg's business model: spying on users.
Sam Altman’s newest invention is a ChatGPT-powered app which is supposed to “proactively [do] research to deliver personalized updates based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar.” It really is amazing, never before has a tech company been able to combine so many of the most loathsome trends in modern life into a single “product”. I rant and rave regularly on the blog about the ills of personalisation, narrowcasting, digital advertising, and AI and this combines all of that into an unholy data harvesting scheme cosplaying as a hustle-culture inspired morning routine productivity app. Kudos to Altman and co for developing a tech product specifically to piss me off.
What makes me most irritated about Pulse, as the abomination is called, is how it uses the mythology of "powerful AI" to trick users – ‘pro users’ who are paying $20 a month for the privilege – to get their data harvested by OpenAI to train new AI models. The idea that it is reasonable for OpenAI to ask you to provide your calendar and emails to give you “more relevant suggestions” is a joke. OpenAI has already illegally scraped the internet, gotten data from Reddit, illegally scanned thousands of books, illegally used thousands of videos, and illegally used millions of images to train its models, but that was not enough to create AGI so now it needs your calendar and your emails too.
When any company asks for personal details to improve the service they provide you they engage in surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s term for a form of for-profit enterprise whose primary form of capital is data. Usually that data is used to target advertisements at you, as that it the main commercial use for personal data, but it could equally be used to try to convince you of things or in a criminal context to trick your or steal your identity. There is to my mind no legitimate reason for surveillance capitalism as a business model to exist. It is in every way a net negative for individuals and society.
OpenAI has made the switch from Silicon Valley angel, a non-profit dedicated to artificial intelligence research for the benefit of humanity, to Silicon Valley devil, (effectively) a for profit surveillance capitalist machine designed to create hype and financial valuations in record time. OpenAI may need your data, but believe me, it does not deserve it.
The idea that a thinking machine would be economically valuable and technically possible is interesting, which is why Asimov and other sci-fi authors wrote successful novels about the concept. But the idea that simply plugging more and more data into a Large Language Model will eventually manifest consciousness is absurd. Altman’s goal of general artificial intelligence or superintelligence or whatever the latest buzzword for the concept of sapient computer programmes is this month has thus far not shown any sign of being possible, nor that his chosen method for trying that goal is in any way appropriate for the task.
Therefore, giving him and his company any more of your data will not further the goal of literally realising deus ex machina. But the data will still exist on their servers, free to be hacked or sold at a later date. As with most of Silicon Valley's "innovation" AI is just a cynical surveillance capitalist venture, it just speedran the process of getting there.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about British politics here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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