(Part 2 is a review of the University of the Arts London AI and Creative Education symposium.)

At a recent workshop I was running on the University of the Arts London AI Principles I paused after a couple of minutes of setting the scene and asked if anyone had any questions. The first was “Where are the people?”. I asked what they meant and they said that when they use AI (by which they meant mainstream chatbots) the answers come up, “…but where are the people based who are writing the answers?”. It took me a couple of seconds to reorient my perspective and give a quick overview of the basics of how the technology functions.

By the end of the workshop the questioner had rebuilt their concept of the technology and asked a couple of pertinent questions based on their new understanding. Principle 4, “Think of AI as a machine, not a person” was a useful point of discussion.

The question came from someone in a role which does not require specific digital expertise or specialist digital knowledge. It’s a perfectly reasonable question if you have little technical context and exactly what the providers of the main GenAI platforms want you to think; that it is a person.

I mentioned the workshop question to a technical developer friend of mine and a couple of days later, out of nowhere, he brought it back up and said that he thought it was profound. “Where are the people?”, he said slowly. Think about it, he said, directing the question at me, “Where are the people?”. This took me by surprise as I had encountered the moment as a failure of my workshop design, my habit of not laying out the basics of a subject before plunging into interpretation. My friend’s reaction made me rethink and reinterpret the question. Yes, it came from a lack of technical knowledge, but it highlighted something deeper.

Everything technological is ‘people’ and when this is obscured, it is almost always to misdirect our attention away from an asymmetry or an abuse of power. “The algorithm has decided” is a neat way to relocate a decision from the designers or managers of a system into the system. The judgement taken has been abstracted into the machine, but the intention still lies with those who control the technology. Perhaps we forget this because we are coxed into believing that we, the users, control the technology?

This mechanism is inherent in many complex systems, including long standing institutions. “The process has decided” implies that a decision has been reached entirely objectively, ironing out the subjectivity or bias of individual decision makers. Any yet, somebody designed the process or signed it off. So, we can always ask “Where are the people?”, a fundamentally political act.

The question highlights that the systems which shape our lives are invented and not discovered. Those who present AI as ‘inevitable’ are implying that the technology is naturally occurring to further obscure the intentions inherent in what has been designed. Mainstream GenAI, especially chatbots, add another layer to this judgement distancing by designing in a persona who is making the decisions. The simulated ‘person’ in the mainstream chatbots is promoted as knowing more than any human with the underlying assumption that more data equals more truth or a greater objectivity.

This is a heady, having your cake and eating it, combo. On the one hand the AI has the contemporary authority of data and on the other it has the authority of a person who ‘knows’ all this data. The AI is sold as a non-subjective subject, a construct usually reserved for deities.

A designer of these systems might point out that they are probabilistic and therefore the judgements made cannot be traced back, there is no mathematical accountability path. All the AI is doing, it could be claimed, is independently finding the truth in the data. Data so vast that the truth must be in there somewhere?

Even beyond the obvious limits of a philosophy of data-as-truth, there are layers and layers of directly constructed interventions to manage and ‘refine’ outputs. For example, the built-in sycophancy which is redolent of the chemical manipulation of tobacco to push addiction. Also, the software harnesses wrapped around the core inference models as a conscious management of the technology conforming to specific social codes and ideologies.  

Any complex system is the designed accumulation of decisions made by people. It might not be possible to trace any given decision back to an individual but there were in there somewhere. So, the question “Where are the people?” might appear naive in our immediate understanding of GenAI because it’s a machine, not a person. However, the very same question when applied not to the use of GenAI, but to its design, does become profound. “Where are the people” should be asked of any complex system because while it might be possible to automate judgement, decisions are always a result, however obscured, of design and design can always be traced back to people.