Does Generative AI “Work”? That’s a Misleading Question.

Generative AI works a lot like fossil fuels “work”—narrowly, intermittently, and with a lot of nasty side effects.

For a decade and a half now, my work has fallen into two categories: collecting evidence on the threat posed by fossil fuels, and deploying written and spoken words to urge action against it. Recently, generative AI systems have entered both of these spheres at a pace I struggle to process.

In jobs that depend on analytical rigour, as well as a desire to craft sincere, authentic and honest human communication, the advent of a ubiquitously available plagiaristic machine that convincingly fabricates facts and feelings seems bad, just on its face. But I don’t think the ethical whiplash is the only reason this moment feels so rotten. There are, in fact, some troubling parallels between how fossil fuels operate and how generative AI operates. 

In the ugly process of sense-making around what is a significant change in how we enact analysis and write words, there has been an exhausting debate around whether generative machine learning “works” or “doesn’t work.” You can find a nice example of this in a December 2024 newsletter by tech writer Casey Newton, in which he slots this fight into two camps: “The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that AI is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous.”

Many reasonable responses to Newton’s piece highlighted the false dichotomy. Plenty of critiques of AI deployment highlight the fact that it tends not to “work” well at the functions it’s marketed for. And that could be perceived as a good thing: As researcher Eryk Salvaggio observed, “systems that don’t work would pose no threat to labor; systems nobody uses would pose no threat to the environment, and systems propped up by a failing industry will collapse—all we have to do is wait.”

But here’s the problem: Something can feel like it’s “working” when really the work is subtly worse, and paired with a shocking but invisible array of secondary harms. Fossil fuels have themselves been persistently marketed by lobby groups for decades as not only being effective carriers of energy, but valuable humanitarian pathways for the alleviation of poverty. In fact, fossil fuels “work,” but they also murder their end-users both through air pollution that poisons people, and by stimulating the rapid overheating of Earth’s life support........

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