Is AI Cheugy?

cheu·​gy ˈchü-gē - cheugier; cheugiest. slang: uncool, unfashionable

It's happened enough times that I'm starting to call it a trend: I talk about something - anything - AI-related, and my listener screws their face into a scowl, gives me a robust side eye glare, and beats a hasty retreat. It's as if, when I mention AI, people suddenly are accosted by a bad smell...the stench of the dangerous and icky.

The AI-pilled amongst us, of course, don't really see this. So caught up in their bubble, so sure of the rightness of their course, so excited by the newness of the tech and so enthused by its promise, they are often blind to the legitimate concerns that many (many!) so-called "normies" have about AI. Anyway, they don't talk to normies.

So let's talk about it.

At Her AI Studio, for which this is an interesting inaugural blogpost, our mission is to empower high school aged girls to learn about AI in a safe space - a space for women, coached by female mentors near their age, using physical AI to build cyberdecks. By using locally-run hardware on which we can run small local AI models, we create a "walled garden" where students can safely experiment with local AI. In doing so, we can also discuss weighty topics of privacy, security, data governance, and the ethical questions surrounding AI.

A cyberdeck built with our kit, including an Arduino Uno Q board, small keyboard and monitor, microphone, camera, and USB Hub. Every student can create their own, this is just my fluffy iteration.

That doesn't make AI any less cheugy (and, increasingly, political, although that's a topic for another day). There are serious question about:

• From where the training data that has fed the models is sourced
• What this technology means for the environment, from training, sourcing materials for hardware, water use, pollution, land use, and more
• How AI is really screwing up education (my own particular hot take) and is being actively banned in some districts
• How deepfakes are ruining lives
• How powerful algorithms are feeding propaganda machines and influencing political outcomes
• How copyright rules and ethical concerns about plagiarism are caught up in this new technology
• How skills are decaying due to being replaced by a technology that can outsource work in a flash

...and more

Headwinds

It's really important to acknowledge these important headwinds and concerns and understand them. Rather than brush anything aside, I propose to address these head on in our cohorts with full transparency and with the understanding that there are many unsavory aspects of this tech. Reactions such as this from Gen Z commenters crystalize the moment. When seeking applicants for our Youth Board, here's a reaction:

Ouch. But point well taken, and gone are the AI images from the site. We are listening.

It's a fine line we're threading, and the gulf is enormous. At one end, we have folks insisting that AI will be so powerful that in a few years it will end us all. At the other end we have folks who advocate banning it entirely.

There has to be some kind of middle ground. The companies making foundational models aren't doing us any favors by promoting the idea that somehow they have created something that will imminently cause a world cataclysm. By not sufficiently creating robust guardrails to protect users from abuse, they are creating a hostile environment for large swaths of the population.

This is precisely why we founded Her AI Studio. We want to ensure that women will have a role to play in the creation of AI, in the design of its guardrails, in the ethics around the kind of data on which it is trained. Without radical inclusion of these voices, we risk creating an "intelligence" that is stunted, that does not resemble our reality, and that cannot meet the needs of 50% of the world's population.

A new approach

We do not approach the topic from a place of weakness or fear. We are not evangelizing AI, or really any particular product. Instead, we use open models, run locally, on hardware that we own, and talk about what this means. We study how data is used, from where it's sourced, what ethical concerns are raised by both building and using AI, and more.

Because if we stay on our current path, we are going to build an AI that is not only unrecognizable, it's not going to be built to serve the best interests of a lot of people. And we find that unacceptable. Unacceptable and truly cheugy.

Visit HerAIStudio.org to learn more.