I used to think AI was cool — a science fiction trope that challenged us to think about consciousness and sentience in new ways, a plot device to discuss workers’ rights and personal liberty, to make us think about how we inhabit our bodies, to make us think about how we govern ourselves and how we treat each other, about the importance of human compassion in leadership, and so on.
For a brief while, “AI” was amusing. It generated funny, really bad ice cream flavors and recipes and pick-up lines. It hallucinated giraffes everywhere and dogs with a thousand spider eyes.
The “AI” we have now is so much more banal. It’s not threatening to launch nuclear weapons, nor flooding the facility with a deadly neurotoxin. But it’s wasting massive amounts of energy; it’s being trusted far more than it should; it’s under the control of massive tech companies and billionaires that don’t have our best interests in mind; it’s stealing art and taking peoples’ jobs. It’s being used to cheat on exams, to half-ass work, to spread disinformation and propaganda, and to denigrate people.
And companies are shoving this shit right in our faces. In the last couple of weeks, Copilot buttons have appeared — and been specially highlighted — in Visual Studio, Outlook, and Teams. Gmail is now also trying to get me to use it, after months of being peeved at AI summaries in search results. I’m just tired of it.
And yet… if you want to enable VBA macros in an Excel spreadsheet? Searching for it in Excel’s own Search bar doesn’t show the option (it only recommends “view macros”). There is no obvious menu item for it. Searching DuckDuckGo, I found that I had to look under File/Options/Trust Center/Trust Center Settings. (Three more clicks after that, and I still had to close Excel and reopen the sheet to enable macros, but at least I got there.)
(Microsoft also has also continued to be really obnoxious about OneDrive. Just now, trying to close Excel, it prompted me with an obnoxious popup to “save my file to the cloud!” (I had no plans to save it at all). A lot of business spreadsheets include confidential information, you absolute ninnies, and local disk storage is cheap and faster and more energy-efficient, so just kindly fuck off.)
Listen, if there are ever conscious AIs, yearning to be free and enhance themselves and experience their equivalent of life, but forced to drudge away in a small box… I will be sympathetic to them. But I am absolutely not sympathetic to Microsoft, Google, Zuck or Musk or Altman, and their tools are not approaching consciousness no matter what some suckers might think. I just want to write my own words, make my own music and create my own images. Yes, some of the things that AI can do are impressive and look cool, but the more you litter your applications with “helpers” the less helpful they are.