Signtist

Yeah, I don’t really understand all these people talking about how it’s unusual. When I was a teenager and I liked a girl, I’d do everything I could to impress her.

“Oh, you said in passing you like this candy? I’ll get you a whole box! Oh, you reminisced about having a furby? I scoured every thrift store in the area to find this one for you! You want to buy this thing? Let me do it! I can do it!”

It’s definitely way too much, to the point where it’s probably creepy, but that’s just how the teenage brain works. They understand enough to know how to show you care, but they don’t understand enough to know that too much of a good thing can be bad.

I’m saying the bad aspects of AI outweigh the good. I left out listing any good aspects of AI because I don’t know any. The comic’s version of Prometheus is a metaphor for the tech billionaire, claiming that he’s done this amazing thing for the benefit of the people, but from his action of plugging his ears, we can see that he knew how his “gift” would be received; he, like the tech billionaire, clearly has his own motivations that he’s passing off as charity.

It’s left ambiguous about whether he’s evil or just ignorant, which is itself a good mirror of real life, where we can’t tell if our overlords are stupid, or are actively planning out the downfall of civilization as we know it. Do they think AI is just a tool, and it’s our fault for being so susceptible to its bad aspects, or was it purposefully designed to exploit them, and the “just a tool” excuse is just them passing the blame? Are we being purposefully led off a cliff, or are we simply following a blind leader to the edge?

The gasoline is ambiguous as well - are these people naturally covered in gasoline, as we may be naturally susceptible to AI and its hallucinations, or were they covered on purpose by someone to prepare them for the fire, as we may have been prepared to accept misinformation online well before AI hit the scene? The comic leaves off any mention of punishment from the gods, maybe to indicate that, like the tech billionaire, the governing body meant to keep them in line is in on the scheme. The very fact that both this comic and the real-life situation it’s parodying have the same questions is indicative of the quality of the metaphor.

I think it works pretty well. Any tool will have good aspects and bad aspects, and its functionality will only be as good as our ability to make use of the good aspects while limiting the bad ones.

Humans benefit from fire because the good aspects of warmth, light, and cooking all vastly outweigh the bad aspect of the danger of catching on fire, which can be mitigated relatively easily by not bringing flammable things near it. If we ourselves were highly flammable, fire would be far too dangerous to be useful.

The obvious AI metaphor points out how, just like paper beings covered in gasoline are weak to fire, human beings are weak to a friendly voice speaking with confidence, and will succumb to it just as quickly if exposed. Any benefit it might have otherwise been able to give is outweighed by the danger of our natural affinity for believing what is told to us by a trusted figure and stubbornly treating it as undeniable fact for the rest of our lives.