IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023 - 12

Editorial
re-emergence of patronage, which served a particular
role in the history of art in early modern Europe,
whereby the wealthy commissioned artistic work as
proof of status (and also specified its form and content),
although this one has probably been busted
by the way that some notorious scam artists and
grifters over-obviously used NFTs. Unfortunately,
perhaps one cannot expect meaningful regulation,
changes to employment law, or appropriate behavior
in academia until the iron triangle formed by the
BigTech-academia-congressional complex is broken
[22]. Until then, one can perhaps but expect
increased inequality (and see IEEE Technology &
Society Magazine, Volume 41, Number 2, Special
Issue on Modern Indentured Servitude).
Ultimately, thoUGh, it bears repeating that it
is not the " AI " that, currently, presents the existential
threat [23]; and it is not the technology that is
" untrustworthy, " that needs to explain itself, or that
should be held to account. These terms apply to " the
system " itself, and the organizations within it (industrial,
academic, and regulatory), that create and
allow unconstrained and unchecked technological
intrusion. We need to overcome our own fatalism
and the belief that their narrative is somehow inevitable
and have a conversation about this. In fact,
we do not just need a conversation, we need a very
vocal protest.
<
Acknowledgments
This article is based on a presentation made at
the Trusting Intelligent Machines (TIM)-4 workshop,
Schloss Rauischholzhausen, 12-16th June 2023.
Many thanks to the participants of the workshop, with
whom discussion and conversation helped inform
and shape this work. Thanks also to the workshop
host, Prof. Michael Gückert (Technische Hochschule
Mittelhessen) for the arrangements and organization.
The author is also highly appreciative of many helpful
comments on early drafts of this article.
g References
[1] J. Dewey, Democracy and Education. Hollywood, CA,
USA: Simon & Brown, 2011.
[2] J. Ober, Demopolis: Democracy Before Liberalism in
Theory and Practice. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2017.
[3] K. Malik, " Fantasy fears about AI are obscuring
how we already abuse machine intelligence, " The
12
Guardian, Jun. 11, 2023. Accessed: Jun. 24, 2023.
[Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2023/jun/11/big-tech-warns-of-threatfrom-ai-but-the-real-danger-is-the-people-behind-it
[4]
T. Benson, " Humans aren't mentally ready for an
AI-saturated 'post-truth world, " ' Wired, Jun. 10, 2023.
Accessed: Jun. 24, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://
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N. Klein, " AI machines aren't 'hallucinating'. But their
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[6]
M. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit. London, U.K.:
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[7] OpenAI. GPT-4 Technical Report. Accessed: Jun.
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papers/gpt-4.pdf
[8] H. Weisberg, Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of
Uncertainty. New York, NY, USA: Wiley, 2014.
[9] A. Nowak et al., Target in Control: Social Influence
as Distributed Information Processing. New York, NY,
USA: Springer-Verlag, 2019.
[10] C. Tavris and E. Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But
Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad
Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Revised Edition). London,
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[11] S. Hamdoun et al., " AI-based and digital mental health
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[12] J. Dzieza, " AI is a lot of work, " New York Magazine:
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article/ai-artificial-intelligence-humans-technologybusiness-factory.html
[13]
S. McClean. The Environmental Impact of ChatGPT:
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[14] J. Pitt, " Futural appropriation, " IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag.,
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[15] M. Russell, " Gloomhaven board game creator: `AI
art feels like theft, " WarGamer. Accessed: Apr. 2,
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[16] D. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York, NY,
USA: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
[17] V. Liu and L. Chilton, " Design guidelines for prompt
engineering text-to-image generative models, " in Proc.
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2023

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