Let’s talk about Function. (This is not an ad for Function.)

Function is a private company that offers you an annual membership to do a hundred or so blood and urine tests on an annual or semi-annual basis. The pitch is that they’re testing for things your doctor can’t be bothered to look at, or that your insurance company might not feel like covering, but that can give you immediately actionable advice on what you can do to be healthier, feel better, and live longer.

One of the showiest uses for GenAI is generating what we will loosely call ‘art.’ In this general use of the word, we mean text-based fictional narratives, poetry, and images or very short video clips that can be photorealistic or illustrated in the style of your choice, anything from Studio Ghibli to Leonardo da Vinci.

All of it sucks.

All right, let’s make the absolute last-ditch argument against using AI. Let’s say that you don’t care that it’s unreliable vis-a-vis objective reality, and that you think the environmental and economic arguments are too big and systemic for your own use to matter. Let’s say that you’re comfortable with the moral implications for your own use cases.

Putting aside all of that, you still surely care about yourself, and about how use of AI is affecting you, personally.

So far I’ve been making the case against AI with cold, hard numbers: error rates, bottles of water evaporated, dollars invested. Now it’s time to move into a more subjective — and yet to my mind, far more important — set of considerations: the moral and ethical implications of AI and how we use it.