--- title: "AI Isn’t Magic, It’s Being Used to Spy on You, Experts Warn" description: "Experts warned that AI's autonomy is just a \"veneer,\" and that it's being used as surveillance through the scraped data it needs to train on." date: "2023-06-23" modified: "2023-06-23" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-magic-spy-on-you-experts-warn" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "generative ai" - "surveillance" - "the digest" --- # AI Isn’t Magic, It’s Being Used to Spy on You, Experts Warn ![Experts warned that AI's autonomy is just a "veneer," and that it surveils you through the scraped data it needs to train on.]() *\Image: Getty Images\* ## Fake Front At a *Bloomberg* technology summit on Friday, several industry experts spoke out against AI's deceptive facade, warning their audience that it's not the "magic" that it appears to be. This innocuous, magical appearance, they argue, leaves the public oblivious to just how intrusive and exploitative the tech can be. To kick things off, Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, called out the CEOs of popular generative AI companies — including [Sam Altman of OpenAI]() and Emad Mostaque at [Stability AI]() — for hiding the fact that their products are [powered by human grunts](). "We know from reporting that there is an army of workers who are doing annotation behind the scenes to even make this stuff work to any degree," Hanna said, as [quoted by ]()*[TechCrunch]().* "They are actually doing the labeling, whereas Sam and Emad and all these other people who are going to say these things are magic — no, there's humans," she added. "These things need to appear as autonomous and it has this veneer, but there's so much human labor underneath it." ## Data Churner As president of the foundation behind the encrypted messaging app Signal, Meredith Whittaker's concerns leaned more towards privacy, something that [chatbots like ChatGPT threaten to undermine](). "I would say maybe some of the people in this audience are the users of AI, but the majority of the population is the *subject* of AI," Whittaker claimed. "This is not a matter of individual choice." Whittaker gave the example of someone who gets denied after applying for a bank loan, explaining that they'd have "no idea that there's a system in \[the\] back probably powered by some Microsoft API that determined, based on scraped social media, that I wasn't creditworthy." "I'm never going to know, there's no mechanism for me to know this," she added. Not only do these AI models operate out of public view, Whitaker continues, they also serve as "surveillance technology." They surveil us through "massive datasets" [collected from humans](), which eventually become "pooled in the hands" of AI firms. Those datasets were scraped from billions of web pages, virtually gleaning data on anyone that's ever used the internet without their permission. "That data becomes data about me," she added. "It doesn’t need to be correct. It doesn’t need to be reflective of who I am or where I am. But it has power over my life that is significant, and that power is being put in the hands of these companies." **More on AI:** *[Predators Are AI-Generating "Really Evil" Child Sex Abuse Images, Experts Warn]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()