Shame, Shame, Shame... AI & Shame as Resistance Tactic
"Well it's easy to mock... fun too..."
Click on pretty much any social media post about AI and the two things you're almost guaranteed to find are a: someone making as completely unsubstantiated claim about productivity, creativity or AGI and b: someone making fun of them for it. Where there's AI hype, there's AI mockery - it's rapidly becoming a natural law, a comforting inevitability like (endless) rain in London. I do it myself, as easily drawn into the sly push backs against grandiose claims about AI as anyone, it's a reflex act, a digital sneer at the absurd and it's easy to dismiss as nothing more. We can all be slightly dickish online and sometimes the target deserves it, so what?
Looking a little beyond that it does raise some questions though. If that easy mockery of strangers online posting AI hype nonsense is a minor act of habit - the ridicule, dismisiveness and even shaming it engages with aren't nothing. They're the minor acts that have built a context where to be absurd about AI, to normalise its (mis)use is something that rarely goes without push back against the individual, if not the giant roaring corporate machine behind them. How much further can that effective pattern of social, cultural and intellectual shaming go..?
As someone who's routinely irritatingly loud about their disdain for most AI implementations it's a thought - a tactic even - that I do think about a fair bit. Recently especially I've heard in passing about a couple of people, academics at my institution, who have been recommending the use of LLMs to students to summarise or write for them. My immediate instinct is one of knee jerk disgust really. AI in education is in a complex place at the moment, broken systems are clashing with AI hype and papering over the long standing cracks in academia by throwing LLMs at them, usually with institutional endorsement. Students, unsatisfied, under-supported and sometimes overworked are turning to tools which I believe do objective harm to what should be most important - their learning experience. But still I don't indulge (much) in the adversarial approach to their AI usage that seems to be pushed in some places. If I can't offer better - and structurally I can't - then I'm not going to judge too harshly. The best I can do is warn, cautioning students about what they're losing as they hand over their cognitive efforts to a junk machine, all to adhere to a system that has precious little interest in them once the fees are extracted and the exam passed.
For those supposedly educating them though? There the dynamic changes. For teachers, at any level, to hand off the work of guiding and supporting learning to slop generators, openly endorsing the offload of what should be a joyous process of exploration - that merits a reaction. How much of a reaction? That's where the idea of the shifting potentials of shame become more complex. Educators don't always have much agency (although they do have more than students) and they're hardly responsible for the institutional fixation on AI in EdTech. Their accountability can only go so far. Where there is agency though? Where the suggestion to use an LLM comes from nothing more than personal engagement with the 'tools', or a reluctance to do the longer job of actually teaching? In the moment of interaction shame seems a reasonable reaction, a minor but relevant step to keeping those techno-solutions a disdainful intrusion into the real, human work of teaching.
None of this amounts to a lot. The mundane acts of resistance seldom do, but they are something nonetheless. Every bit of mockery, every expression of the darker failings behind AI systems that should shame the enthusiasts - it's all tiny acts in casting a social and cultural landscape where adoption of and praise for those technologies is a risk, an exposure of some failing from the exponent. That's a thing worth building but not without a conscious attempt to understand the contexts involved.
Looking to another damning technology flourishing under capitalism - the use of fossil fuels which perpetuate climate damage - we can see how badly the tactics of shame can be mobilised. The individualisation of shame there have been a tool for stamping down, with guilt eagerly assigned to the random person taking their package holiday while those profiting most from it shrug off responsibility with a nice green washing ad. Tech companies would love to abdicate their own guilt by using such tactics, in fact that already do. A lack of any functional guardrails on LLMs for example is offset by a cautionary note at the top of the page - if you are harmed by this tool we've designed to extract from you and monopolise your attention then that's your own stupid fault, we had nothing to do with it... If your child ends up emotionally damaged by this machine we made with reckless indifference to that possibility then you should have been watching them closer.
Shame as an effective tool for resisting the companies that revel in those atomising scatterings of responsibility has to, by necessity, be selective. Before we mock, before we flash disdain, we need to read the context of those we're dealing with. Although, for reference, you've probably still got a free pass on anyone who says AI is great on LinkedIn...
Ultimately shame, at its worse, is a toxic imposition of individual responsibility, devoid of structural critique, eager in its gossipy pettiness towards individuals often more victim than perpetrator. But as with the example of educators pushing AI with what little agency they have to themselves, in the immediate spaces of interaction with students, it can also be an important tool to protect and re-frame spaces into something better. That's where the target of shame isn't the focus, it's everyone around them. It's focused on those with the potential to do harm by normalising bad 'tools' and practices, it's focused on protecting those important, human processes that come under threat when bad choices are made to bury, negate or marginalise them.
This isn't a user-guide to undermining people, more a remark on the value of derision, perhaps a prompt even to consider where and how we can mobilise our mocking voices to resist what's bad and protect what's good. Something to think about.
- Dylan