The Case for AI Education over Abstinence

By Lindsey Asis

When I started as an intern in college for an artificial intelligence nonprofit, the world was different. AI was abstract, technical, and hardly seen or talked about by normal people. Now, just 6 years later, Big Tech has taken over AI, and the stakes have never been higher to learn how to use it safely. 

I used to think that AI could help save the world. In some ways, I still do. My undergraduate education was in Sustainability Studies, and before the data center boom, I believed technological advancements like precision agriculture were necessary to meet the climate crisis. My internship became my early career, where I researched and wrote recommendations for city and national-level governments to integrate AI sustainability solutions. I met countless researchers, engineers, and data scientists from around the world who were desperate to use their skills to meet the need of the moment. Their work gave me hope that our brightest minds were on the case.

To be clear, the problems with AI have existed from Day One. Computer scientists are amazing, but they often lack a liberal arts education that teaches people that racism still exists and that women are also people. Ethics has often been a second-order priority to innovation, and this has been a serious failing with exponential consequences over time. Obviously, data bias is one of these consequences, but perhaps the more insidious one is an undemocratic and unscrupulous profit motive.

Fast-forward to today. Large Language Models (LLMs) have gone from the hands of a few researchers at MIT to your mom’s, who is putting her Social Security number into ChatGPT for tax advice. AI is everywhere. You can’t even Google a fact without being fire-hosed with misinformation. Before our senators could learn what Instagram is, Big Tech had absorbed every data scientist in the world, increased LLM queries exponentially, and placed a data center in every marginalized community. Sustainable AI has become an oxymoron.

If AI were left to a few engineers working to perfect irrigation, or even to specialized workers cutting one of their tasks in half with automation, we would not be where we are. AI is not inherently unsustainable; unregulated capitalism is. 

I am not going to argue that unregulated AI is here to stay, but I will argue that it is here now, and people are using it. And if I learned one thing from going to high school in Texas, it is that teaching abstinence never works.

Moral absolutism doesn’t reduce teen pregnancy rates, and it isn’t going to protect workers in the Age of AI. Executive suites and employees alike must be aware of the costs of AI, from their utility bills that are about to spike to the litigation they will face from data security breaches. Workers have to be informed of the high likelihood of AI hallucinations, because they will be on the chopping block before the LLM they were encouraged to use is.

When we take the time to learn about the tools we are using, the world slows down. Showing people the benefits and costs of AI reminds them that they have control of how and when they use it. They can decide when or if it is worth it to use AI, they can feel confident in the information they share with it, and they can be assured that AI will never be able to do what they do. Big Tech wants us to forget our value, and education gives us back our agency.  

In the work we do at the OP, we are aware of both the potential and the risks of advanced workplace technology. In our work, we talk to employees about their real concerns and the ways that AI has made their lives easier. We open the channels of communication between colleagues, making the changing world less daunting. I am proud of the difference we are making. The government is far too slow to protect us, and Big Tech will always choose profit despite social harm. Until regulation catches up, it is up to us to educate ourselves and make our own decisions about how to live sustainably and ethically.