Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal messaging app, believes that artificial intelligence (AI) is essentially a surveillance advertising machine. She said this while speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023.
“AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” Whittaker said.
Whittaker argued that AI is largely inseparable from big data and targeting industries such as Google and Meta.
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“It requires the surveillance business model; it’s an exacerbation of what we’ve seen since the late ’90s and the development of surveillance advertising. AI is a way, I think, to entrench and expand the surveillance business model,” adding that “the Venn diagram is a circle.”
Whittaker’s arguments come at a time when there is growing concern amongst the public about the use of AI and its potential threat to be used to manipulate people and violate their privacy.
“You know, you walk past a facial recognition camera that’s instrumented with pseudo-scientific emotion recognition, and it produces data about you, right or wrong, that says ‘you are happy, you are sad, you have a bad character, you’re a liar, whatever.’ These are ultimately surveillance systems that are being marketed to those who have power over us generally: our employers, governments, border control, etc., to make determinations and predictions that will shape our access to resources and opportunities,” she said.
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Meredith explained that even though we often think of AI as being super smart and automated, a lot of the data that AI relies on is actually organised and labelled by regular people. These people are paid very little for their work, even though collectively, it’s a costly process. Without this human effort, AI systems wouldn’t work.
“In some ways what we’re seeing is a kind of Wizard of Oz phenomenon, when we pull back the curtain there’s not that much that’s intelligent.”
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