Enshittification is not a law of nature
Stop acting like you have no choice but to ruin everything.
I just read a WIRED interview with Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications (she runs the business side of OpenAI, including ChatGPT, while Sam Altman has apparently narrowed his focus to the research and compute side of the organization). She said a few things I found encouraging and some others I found troubling, but here is the quote that made me want to throw my phone:
During a discussion of the mounting scrutiny, criticism and safety concerns OpenAI has faced around mental health, Simo said that with 800 million weekly users,
“doing the right thing every single time is exceptionally hard. So what we’re trying to do is catch as much as we can of the behaviors that are not ideal and then constantly refine our models.”
STOP. No. This is absolute bullshit and we both know it, Fidji Simo. (And frankly, I’m side-eying WIRED’s interviewer for not calling it out.)
Literally NO ONE is forcing OpenAI to make ChatGPT freely available to 800 million users with no safety-oriented onboarding requirements whatsoever. That’s entirely on OpenAI. Simo and her colleagues could address these issues much more effectively in a number of ways, but they won’t pursue those solutions because doing so might have a chilling effect on the overheated hype that’s fueling their rapid expansion.
Simo isn’t alone in her wrongness, she’s just the latest to publicly whine about how HARD it is to solve the very problems her company creates. I’m usually pretty pacifist by nature, but I kind of want to slap rich and powerful C-Suite folks when they go on about how difficult it is to act responsibly, like they aren’t whole entire moral agents freely making choices about how to do things.
“Make number go up” — a.k.a. the fiduciary duty to deliver maximum profits to shareholders/investors — is not a moral imperative or an immutable law of nature. It’s a shitty line of code in our national financial architecture that poisons every company it touches.
Stop acting like you have no choice in the matter. You absolutely do. B Corps exist. Non profits exist (despite OAI having stretched that concept to its breaking point). There are ways investment contracts can be written that incentivize long-term sustainability and social responsibility over short-term gains.
Instead, we get a bunch of hand wringing and excuses and whining from these massively overpaid and objectively powerful people, and no one calls them out. Not once is any of this pointed out by the journalist who wrote the article accompanying this quote.
It reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s commentary around enshittification — especially his constant reminders that enshittification is a choice.
No one is forcing these companies to prioritize scale over safety and product quality. Peter Thiel is full of shit when he says that people who want to slow down or attempt to regulate AI deployment and expansion are “the antichrist.” Mindfulness is in no way a synonym for evil.
On the contrary, people who want the leading AI labs to slow down and be thoughtful and intentional about how to integrate new technologies into society the right way — safely and with respect for human flourishing — are merely asking the leaders of these companies to more meaningfully reflect upon and take responsibility for the consequences of their own goddamned decisions. Like adults are meant to do.
-Kir