Pro-AI People and Anti-AI People Are Good People

Most hearts are good, including those of your ideological enemies

The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, 1511

Most hearts are good. Most disputes, however profound they seem, can be mitigated by an effort to understand those hearts that beat to a different rhythm than yours. But most people don’t do that. If I side with the tech powers turning this green paradise into a wasteland, you strip me of my humanity. If I fail to embrace the promises of progress, clothed in Luddite beliefs, you shame me in a bath of ignorance.

Darkened by the wrong beating cadence and the murkiest circumstances, my heart looks black, undeserving of your consideration. To you, I’m evil. Philosopher Hannah Arendt already wrote about such banalities so I won’t try to add here to her thoughts. This is merely a reminder: Yes, people get swept away by cruelty-turned-normality, yet—and this is the reading I’ll focus on—few people are truly evil.

These days I’m out of sync. Sides have been picked and considerations for empathy and common ground dismissed. But I’m no Luddite and no techno-optimist. I remain split in two, just like the world around me, and bear the burden of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. Many artists denounce technologists as unempathetic; many technologists disregard artistry as replaceable. As a tech writer who likes words and robots, I’m trapped in the crossfire.

Both groups insist on playing a dance of blame and shame while their good, but asynchronous hearts beat at the speed of conflict. Perhaps they’re truly irreconcilable—not trying to sell you a meaningless utopia—but one belief I have is that we can strive to respect beliefs we don’t have (even as we protect ourselves from them). How do I respect a war against my integrity, you ask? How do I defend my one half from my other half? How do I forgive my ideological enemy?

The only valid answer is the realization that we’re always living at the “edge of the precipice,” as C. S. Lewis said. There’s always an unwanted fiend chasing you. There’s always a foe to beat in the rhetorical arena. There’s always an unjustified war you’re forced to fight—if you’re unlucky, it’s literal. So you choose. Do you live with a heart filled with understanding or vicious hate?

Debates about creativity and artificial intelligence—about the technology itself, about how it advances progress or induces regress, about best and worst applications, about good design intentions and twisted goals—dissolve to the very essence only when you understand that people, good people, still experience life in radically different ways.

For some, life is an end in itself; for others, a means to an end.

Some write to write, walk to walk, talk to talk… they live to live. Others write to publish, walk to arrive, talk to share or explain or convince, and live to survive.

Some think it’s sacrilegious to use AI to write. They’d rather put a gun in their mouth. For others, it’s good business. For some, a two-hour walk clears the mind and a relaxed conversation is quality time. For others, the car is essential even for grocery shopping and the goal of chit-chat is always networking.

For some, life’s a journey. For others, a series of transactions.

The whole point of this essay is that both are okay.

Two good people can live good lives so distinct from one another that a Venn diagram measuring the similarity across activities, hobbies, beliefs, and goals results in two non-overlapping circles. This caricatured dichotomy is fake, of course—no one person embodies either extreme. But it’s easy to imagine that the closer you are to one pole, the less in common you have with those at your antipodes.

Just to give you a quick example, I’m sure no artist can understand why an AI enthusiast prefers to make a hundred cats per second instead of learning to draw one themselves. But the cat is not the point! The point is that we don’t see the same world because there’s not one world to see. Yet we insist on pushing our lens into the acts and words of others. We forget most hearts—pulsing in harmony with either romanticism or hyperoptimization but never both—are good.

As J. R. R. Tolkien wrote:

For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more—remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.

People working in tech or using tech products have good hearts. They want to create or validate progress as they understand it not destroy the commons or replace their peers. People doing art or writing have good hearts. They want to express themselves and enjoy a livable life not hinder innovation and revert progress.

Those you see acting bad rarely have a bad heart. Evil is often banal but always scarce.

Anyway, why write about this on a tech blog? It’s forums like this where the streams converge, the proverbial Rome of this fundamental schism over artificial intelligence. This essay is an appeal to people who share my sensibility. I’m split in two because the world is but I’d rather not be. I want this place to be a tribute to both writing and art but also to AI and technology. And a forum where diverse hearts can coexist.

I want you here especially if you understand that.

I’m not trying to solve the world—this article (or anything else anyone may write) won’t matter much at that scale—but it matters to me that you reflect on this. The gap is likely irreconcilable writ large but those who make an effort to step in other people’s shoes once in a while live better lives and make better the lives of others.

If you choose this path, let me share a couple of secrets before I go.

Be warned: Deeply understanding something risks undeserved forgiveness (you may absolve who shouldn’t be) and being accused of justifying the unjustifiable (I have been). I’m not asking you to justify or forgive—that’s for accomplices and saints—but to be compassionate, respectful, and comprehensive.

You do it for you, not them.

Be doubly warned: It takes a special kind of courage to speak your mind in times of extreme polarization. Once you understand that the rhyme of a heartbeat doesn’t define the heart, you’ll live forever in asynchronicity. No one won’t see you as one of Them. You’ll become the O-negative of empathy. You will sound insane.

That’s why most people don’t do it. But who wants to be like most people? Akira Kurosawa said, “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.” Kurt Vonnegut agreed: “A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” It would seem it’s always been this way, for Miguel de Cervantes had already captured this profound insight in his eternal Don Quixote:

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness—and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

This is my homage to that.