Artificial Intelligence. What was once a topic of only the academic elite is now the dinner conversation starter of our time. Everyone from grandma to your dog groomer has an opinion on it. As they should. After all, its tentacles are now up in everyone’s business in some way or another.
At the same time, its popularity has definitely lowered the average quality of discourse. Any of you fellow masochists stuck in the AI-twitter trenches like me will know just how vicious and tribal the dialogue has become. The accelerationists smear the safetyists, who finger-point at the technologists, who try to shield themselves behind the ethicists, who blame seemingly everyone but especially the safetyists who they accuse of secretly being accelerationists. Then you have the all the competing government & NGO interests, the religious groups, the manosphere, mother’s groups, leftists, libertarians, environmentalists and everything in between.
The schism-generating forces of the Culture Wars are hardly new, but they’re especially merciless on a topic as broad-ranging and disruptive as AI… because not only are the number of conflicting opinions growing rapidly, but the conviction of belief of each faction is calcifying too. Which doesn’t bode well for civilizational coordination around AI, should it be needed.
Which is why I teamed up with Stephanie Lepp of Faces of X to make the above video.
Titled “Faces of AI”, it’s an art-piece that attempts to portray the dizzying landscape of AI opinions (or at least, some fraction of that landscape), and then steelman and synthesize those opinions into a higher-dimensional, and thus hopefully more accurate, view. In other words, find a win-win which satisfies as many as possible. Which is not easy to do in six minutes, but we tried anyway.
Stephanie’s made a number of these “Faces of [X]” before, like this one on capitalism, which features three characters…
…pro capitalist Liv, anti-capitalist Liv, and then a friendly synthesis Liv. A relatively simple script formula.
We started out with the same plan for this AI video too.
But as we began writing, we realised such a compression of reality would be a fundamental error from the start. So we added more…
and more
…until we ended up with TEN characters. And that was still insufficient, frankly.
Anyway, just watch the video. I apologize if I butcher your accent, your gender, or your particular AI tribe, but know that I am not a professional actor and this was made as an earnest attempt to portray the valid opinions that each character brings to the table.
Remember: not all of these opinions are equally “correct”… rarely does the truth lie in the middle of a disagreement. But each character represents a legitimate concern, and thus, has a legitimate part to play in helping map the multi-dimensional, time-evolving complex hypershape that is the “truth” of the AI debate. And if we can get a clearer picture of the landscape ahead, we stand a better chance of navigating it.
LMK what you think! Also, if you’re feeling inspired, this video format is designed to be copy-able, if you’d like to make your own. Go check out Faces of X to see how Stephanie makes them, and give her a follow too — the internet is flooded with too much schism-generating tribal content, and desperately needs more synthesis/win-win generating art and content. So if you do make your own, let us know and we’ll happily amplify it!
