🏭 OpenAI and AI as a Privacy Dystopia
AI's Legal and Ethical Challenges | Edition #192
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🏭 OpenAI and AI as a Privacy Dystopia
Yesterday, OpenAI made an announcement that made it clear that AI, as it's currently being developed and deployed, represents the privacy dystopia many of us feared would materialize. But not for the reasons most people think.
Before I continue, and to clarify my point, I want to remind everyone that a privacy dystopia doesn't appear out of nowhere. It becomes possible because it has been consolidated, legalized, and legitimized over the past 30 years. AI simply brings it to a new level. Why?
The commercial internet began as a free online public sphere. It was only free because its most popular players, including search engines and news websites, adopted a free-with-ads business model.
Social media followed the same path: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snap, TikTok, and others were (and still are) all free-with-ads.
To the public, it all seemed great: “I get all of that for free!” But as with most things in life, there is no free lunch. Free-with-ads also has a price.
And unexpectedly, AI's rapid growth is helping us realize that free-with-ads and the total erosion of privacy come at a much higher cost than we initially thought.
Why, and what's the connection?
Let me use social media as an example. The free-with-ads business model means that social media companies make more money the better the ads perform. So, they need to constantly optimize their platforms to increase:
The number of users
The amount of time users spend
The level of engagement
The amount of personal content shared by users
The amount of personal data collected
The amount of personal data shared with advertisers
The sophistication of profiling methods
There are two main consequences of this type of optimization on social media:
The first consequence is the kind of social media platforms we have today, which contain:
Highly addictive feeds and interfaces
Extreme, sensational, polarizing, and harmful content
Misinformation
Etc.
The second consequence is the complete erosion of privacy from cultural, technological, economic, and political perspectives. We have privacy erosion by design.
Because personal data is the cheap oil fueling the free-with-ads business model, people are constantly led to believe that privacy is not important, not worth their attention, and something they should get used to living without.
This erosion is uncontrolled and, when paired with a fast-growing trend like AI, it can lead to unexpectedly dystopian outcomes.
And here comes the connection to AI and OpenAI’s announcement yesterday: