The Hypocrisy of AI Ethics

Every time I hear a CEO or a high priced consultant start talking about the ethics of artificial intelligence I want to put my head through a fucking wall. It is the most transparent load of horse shit I have ever seen in my life. These people do not give a single fuck about the moral implications of technology or the future of humanity. They care about two things: protecting their own market share and making sure they don't get sued. They use words like responsibility and safety and alignment because those words sound good in a press release and they keep the regulators off their backs. It is a massive smokescreen designed to hide the fact that they are in a desperate arms race to see who can build the most powerful profit machine first. The idea that we can somehow program morality into a statistical model is a joke that only an academic or a PR executive could take seriously.

You see these companies forming ethics boards and publishing white papers that are hundreds of pages of absolute nothingness. They use a bunch of fancy language to say that we should be careful and that we should consider the impact of our actions on society. No shit. That is true of literally every technology since the invention of the wheel. But they only talk about it now because they are terrified that some kid in a basement is going to build a model that is better than theirs and they won't be able to control the narrative anymore. They want to set the rules for the playground so they can make sure nobody else gets to play. If they actually cared about ethics they would be transparent about their training data and they would be honest about how these models are actually being used to replace human labor on a massive scale. But they aren't honest because honesty doesn't help the stock price.

The most hilarious part of this entire charade is the concept of AI safety. They act like they are trying to prevent a Terminator scenario where a superintelligence decides to wipe out the human race. It is a great distraction because it is a problem that doesn't actually exist yet. While everyone is arguing about whether or not a computer will eventually become sentient and turn us all into paperclips the actual companies are using AI right now to manipulate markets and spread misinformation and exploit workers. That is the real ethical crisis but it isn't nearly as sexy as talking about the apocalypse. They want you to worry about a future that might never happen so you don't notice the damage they are doing in the present. It is the ultimate magician's trick. They point at the scary robot in the distance while they pick your pocket in the front row.

When a brand tells you they have an ethical AI framework they are telling you that they have found a way to justify their behavior to their shareholders. They use these frameworks to decide which voices to silence and which ideas to promote based on what is currently popular in the culture. It isn't about being good it is about being safe for advertisers. They are building machines that are biased because the people who build them are biased. There is no such thing as an objective algorithm. Every choice made by a developer is a moral choice whether they realize it or not. By pretending that the machine is some kind of neutral arbiter of truth they are abdicating their own responsibility as human beings. They want to be able to blame the model when something goes wrong instead of taking the heat themselves. It is a cowardly way to run a business and it is a slap in the face to anyone who actually cares about the future of this technology.

The hypocrisy is also deep in the way these companies talk about open source. They started out as non profits or open research groups and the second they saw a path to a billion dollars they slammed the doors shut. They claimed it was for safety reasons because the technology was too dangerous to be released to the public. That is a fucking lie. It was for profit reasons because they didn't want anyone else to have the secret sauce. They used the collective knowledge of the entire internet to build their products and then they decided that the internet shouldn't be allowed to see how they work. They are the biggest thieves in history and they are doing it all while lecturing us on the importance of intellectual property and digital rights. It is enough to make you sick.

As a brand strategist your only ethical obligation is to be honest with your customers. Don't tell them you are using a human to do a job if a machine is doing it. Don't tell them your AI is unbiased if you know it was trained on a pile of garbage data. Stop trying to hide behind these corporate frameworks and start taking ownership of the tools you use. If you use AI to generate a campaign then own the output. If the output is offensive or stupid that is on you not the machine. We need to stop treating AI like it is some kind of alien life form and start treating it like the software that it is. Software doesn't have ethics. People have ethics. If you are a shitty person you will use AI to do shitty things. It is that simple. The rest of the conversation is just noise designed to keep the consultants in business and the CEOs out of jail.

We are also seeing a massive wave of virtue signaling from brands that claim they won't use AI because they want to support human artists. This is usually just because they are too cheap or too stupid to figure out how to use the technology correctly. They want to get the moral high ground without having to actually do any work. They know that a certain segment of their audience is scared of AI so they play to that fear to build loyalty. It is just another marketing tactic. In five years when everyone is using AI these same brands will quietly integrate it into their workflow and they will hope that nobody remembers what they said. It is the same thing that happened with the internet and the same thing that happened with social media. The moralists of today are always the hypocrites of tomorrow.

If you really want to be ethical then focus on the actual humans who are affected by your business. Use the efficiency of AI to pay your employees better or to lower your prices for your customers. Use it to solve real problems instead of just creating more digital clutter. Stop worrying about the hypothetical feelings of a large language model and start worrying about the actual people who are struggling to survive in a world that is changing too fast for them. That is where the real work is. The rest of the AI ethics conversation is just a bunch of wealthy people in California trying to feel better about themselves while they build a future that none of us asked for. Don't buy into the hype and don't let them tell you what is right and wrong. Use your own brain and your own conscience and leave the corporate theater to the actors.