Finding our balance with AI
offering 3 free ways to learn more about everyday AI and data risks & opportunities
Much of the discussion around AI is polarized and not always constructive. (More heat than light.)
When it comes to AI, folks should be able to:
✅ Shine light on the dark underbelly of how most AI platforms are currently built, and advocate for less-harmful alternatives, without being disparaged or dismissed as fear-driven Luddites.
✅ Use AI tools selectively to help themselves overcome obstacles or keep food on their table without being shamed or cast as immoral. (And no one owes anyone else a disclosure of their disabilities or other perhaps-personal reasons for using AI or any other tool.)
✅ Call out the hype of the 8-figure tech bros as self-serving propaganda or as scientifically unsound without being smeared as envious.
✅ Share ways they’re using AI platforms constructively without being branded as sellouts.
✅ Point out privacy risks and other potential harms without being dismissed as laggards who are out of touch with the modern reality that AI is firmly entrenched in our daily lives.
We need less name-calling and more BALANCE.
👉 LESS leveraging and celebrating AI tools without caring for the millions (billions?) of people being exploited to create those tools. Instead of closing our eyes or simply fretting over internal conflict about our use of unethically-developed tools, we can do MORE to offset the harm by taking concrete actions to help affected communities.
👉 LESS bashing anyone who touches an AI tool and MORE allowing that their decision might be ethical and they might already be working to solve the underlying systemic issues. Being the ‘AI police’ can impede potential allies from acknowledging the problems and joining the work.
Fixing our broken, exploitative global ecosystem will be hard, no question. AI is hard too, right? But AI is progressing because people care enough (even if for self-serving reasons, in some cases) to work on it. We can do more than one hard thing at a time as a society. And we must. (Not only in AI ethics … in all of the other ways our current society is unjust, too.)
No one person can do all the things, but we all can do something. We have more collective power than we often realize, and we can’t afford to abdicate it. AI impacts all of us nowadays. Even people who don’t seek out AI tools to use are affected by the risks.
“Nearly all Americans use products that involve artificial intelligence (AI) features, but nearly two-thirds (64%) don’t realize it.” - Gallup poll, Jan. 2025 1
A key first step to building a more ethical AI ecosystem is to help more people to see the issues and acknowledge their existence & importance.
"Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
– James Baldwin
🎁 To learn more about the everyday risks and uses of AI & data today, free:
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Hi Karen, I'd love to preview your upcoming book.
I’d love to learn more concrete actions. What do you suggest? I feel like the small things I do that I think might help feel like tiny little drops in the bucket and I’d love more ideas. I did recently become a member of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, and they seem like an awesome group! Curious what other actions are helpful.