At Work, at School, and Online, It’s Now AI Versus AI

The perfect model for big tech companies to generate continual big profits is to create a huge problem with their product and then sell you the solution. Over and over and over.

These are stories about AI, but they’re also stories about broken systems. Students flocking to ChatGPT in the classroom suggests that they see school in terms of arbitrary tasks and attainment rather than education. The widespread use of AI in job hunting drives home the extent to which platforms like LinkedIn, which promises to connect job seekers with employers, have instead installed themselves between them, pushing both sides to either pay up or dishonestly game their systems. A dating app where users see opportunity in automated flirting must already be a pretty grim space. If Facebook can be so quickly and thoroughly overwhelmed by AI-generated imagery and bots, it probably wasn’t much of a social network anymore — a low-trust platform better at monetizing users than connecting them. Smaller-scale AI arms races like these don’t take hold unless users (or workers, or students) have already been pitted against one another by systems they don’t respect. In an uncomfortably large portion of modern life — especially online — that’s exactly what’s happened.