Make AI Boring Again - by Charity Majors - charity.wtf
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Make AI Boring Again<br>On the ethics of engagement, the problem with purity politics, and a world worth fighting for
Charity Majors<br>Jun 24, 2026
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I am a contrarian who likes to argue and complain a lot. Because of this, I have never been inclined to block people who argue with me or complain about my work, or even lash out at me with some hostility. I could say a lot of noble sounding things about how I value debate and open discourse, and those things would be true, but I also just feel like I should tolerate other people as much as they have to tolerate me.<br>I recently wrote a piece about AI enthusiasts vs AI skeptics — a very mild piece, I might add, almost repulsively brimming over with both-sides-are-good-people’s and can’t-we-all-just-get-along’s. Yet I have blocked more people in the past three weeks than the past ten years.1 There is a fear in the water right now that is bringing the crazy out in all of us.<br>The stakes are not low. The world is burning, after all. CEOs go on job-murdering sprees and the Industrial Revolution may be coming for knowledge workers. Even the Pope is alarmed.<br>AI is not special
It bothers me when I see people holding AI up like it’s something special — uniquely evil, incomparably harmful, irreparably tainted. It is none of those things. AI is just technology.
Some technologies are more damaging than others — knives are less damaging than guns, Facebook for colleges was less damaging than Facebook for Myanmar — but we always discover risks before we know how to govern them.2 There is always a gap while we try to catch up.<br>That gap is not proof that AI is evil. It is proof that we have work to do.<br>The fact that we have not solved the problems yet is not an argument to disconnect. It is an argument to engage, especially if you work in technology and already have an arsenal of relevant skills.<br>You do not learn to govern a tool by refusing to touch it. You learn by using it and understanding well enough to critique it, shape it, contribute to it, and set boundaries around it. You learn how to make it boring.<br>“Learn AI so you can complain about AI better.” I said it and I meant it. I still do.<br>There are a number of harms associated with AI
I took to Bluesky and started a thread to catalogue the harms associated with AI. There seems to be two buckets: harms done in the creation of AI (e.g. training without permission or compensation, labor exploitation in data labeling) and harms enabled by the use of AI (e.g. revenge porn, the ouroboros of truthiness and the problem of attribution, energy and water usage).<br>I am not trying to minimize or deny these harms. Indeed, I think part of being a responsible user of AI means educating ourselves and acting to counter these harms.<br>Where I diverge from many is that I don’t think awareness of these harms leads inexorably to the conclusion, “thus I should not use it or engage with AI.”
I think the moral valence points in the other direction, especially for those of us in tech. I think we have a moral responsibility to engage, become experts, become people worth listening to. I think the next generation of technology is being hammered out right now, and I want to help shape it. I think unilateral disarmament in the face of powerful new tools is neither wise or an effective strategy.3<br>But let’s talk about those buckets of harm first.<br>Harms tied to how AI was built
The argument I hear the most goes something like this. “AI was trained on stolen data,4 therefore anyone who uses it is complicit. If you care about artists, you should not use these tools, and should try to avoid any art generated using AI.” Or this article, “On the acceptance of GenAI,” which I’ve been sent many times.<br>No, you should avoid AI-generated art because most of it is terrible. Honestly, if there is one segment I am not worried about at all, it is whether or not art will thrive. Aesthetics will have their own revenge, and it will be vicious. It is already happening<br>It’s worth pointing out that ethics, morality and the law are different things . We don’t know yet if the way OpenAI trained their models is legal or not. The law doesn’t cover it, and case law to date has been muddled, contradictory, and narrowly decided based on the facts. It’s Schroedinger’s Law — we’ll find out if it was legal or not once the Supreme Court weighs in.<br>But even if it turns out to have been legal, was it right? Not in my book.
Training data is not the only harm done: there is also exploited labor, energy costs, clean water, quality of life issues for communities, tax issues (did you know datacenters pay no taxes, and are offered billions in tax BREAKS by local govts?), concentration of power amongst certain elites, the apparent sociopathy of key actors, and more.<br>If you want to support artists, support artists.5 But there is no such thing as original sin. Technology is a tool. What...