position-statement

(perhaps I should frame this as my nuance ‘in the middle’ take, not pro AI and not anti AI)

As I do this research it has become clear to me that I need to communicate my stance and position on artificial intelligence and AI. I often find when I talk about my PhD causally with others, many people seem to immediately think that I am ‘pro-AI’ which I really am not. At the same stretch I can also acknowledge potential benefits that this technology might be able to offer, and I feel it’s really important to not position AI (generative AI tools specifically) as ‘being a certain way’ or ‘AI wants to do x y z’. The mythic AGI state has not yet been achieved and I think its really important to call it what it is, a technology - being wielded by big corporations and by some very dubious individuals. This is the issue to face. As such I see AI as a material in a sense, as in we can use or not use it, and that’s fine and that we should recognise the problematic encroachment of AI tools into our lives, privacy and data as being operated by human beings driven by financial and ideological goals.

In more specific terms in regards to my research

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

my take on LLMs and why I think its important to engage with:

‘tech bros’ / industry has always been difficult space to get into. Often alienating and not inclusive. This is broadly speaking, but also what I have experience myself personally as some coming into the scene not from a computer science or engineering background.

this impenetrability too extends to academia

what LLMs seem to show is that is allows many people access skills and capacities that they might otherwise have struggled with karpathy-2025-power-to-the-people.

At the moment and since the LLM boom, it’s clear that there is this is this race for dominance by the major tech corporations, this is resulting in many products being developed, but also in this way where AI is being shoved into every application and the public is being forced to engage with this in a way that they never consented to. In the educational domain I see this happening in different initiatives being set up (open-ai-anthropic-education-partnerships gemini-google-ai-education). Though this is often done in collaboration with academic institutions, this to me is an overstep, a situation where these companies financially want to make a claim, before its even clear the full impacts of these technologies on education, there is a sovereignty issue here almost like the collective knowledge and expertise of the people in these systems can be funneled into the tech organisations (data).

my thoughts in response to the sentiments / understanding that AI is bad:
the technology is not inherently bad, fundamentally it is just computation, an algorithmic system and I think it’s important to stay grounded in that reality. However the myths, narratives and material impacts of the pursuit of this continuing pursuit of this technology is something that is causing many harms - particularly becasue the people that hold the greatest influence are these major corporations driven by a small community of very wealthy powerful people. They develop and push the main narratives that drive the adoption and development of this technological progress.

The infrastructure materially and foundationally of the commercial AI tools and giant tech companies is exploitative (hao-empire-of-AI-2025 & Atlas of AI).

As a society of people I believe we need agency to claim ownership on what ‘AI’ means. As a medium that will potentially be embedded into everything tech device, interface or platform it becomes like a membrane surrounding everything. As such we should have a level of understanding and agency on how we build or implement and integrate these things into our lives.

the impact so far has shown that these systems have impacts on how we think (cheng-et-al-sychophantic-AI-promotes-dependency & malmqvist-sychophancy-llm-causes-and-mitigation) so therefore this is something to think carefully about, particularly in the realm of education.

my thoughts about utilising live coding as a method in this research (acknowledging the displeasure of many in the community regarding LLMs)

live coding for me was my real ‘initiation’ into the tech scene, as mentioned having not studied this at university (the first time), and having come from an art and design background, all of my exposure to tech from 2013 was self taught, but when I encountered the livecoding scence I felt for the first time that I felt a practice and ethos that really excited and made me feel included and accepted (regardless of my background).