Divided Together: How AI uses Algorithms to Keep us Apart

Divided Together: How AI uses Algorithms to Keep us Apart

My name is Ben, and I am a first-year student at the University of Toledo majoring in Electrical Engineering. I enjoy playing both board and video games with my friends and family, and I enjoy building legos in my free time. I wrote this essay because it was a topic I am very interested in and I feel strongly about. I also wrote the essay because it was an option for my final project for a class. It also seemed like a good way to strengthen my writing, share my thoughts and ideas with others, and see how other people feel on the issue I will present in my essay.

AI is unavoidable; it permeates every surface of the internet that we use, streaming services, ads, and the very videos you are recommended on sites and apps like YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and so many more. Almost anything that has a recommended Tab or a For You page in some way uses AI and Algorithms to track what you like and what you watch and give you more of that content. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? Not having to work hard to find content that you will like and will enjoy, it is nice to have a recommended video be exactly what you are looking for, but it makes seeing what you don’t agree with harder to find.

That is the start of the issue that this essay is centered around: how these AI-driven algorithms keep giving us what we want to see, and on the surface, that doesn’t sound too bad, but the underlying byproducts this causes are what we as a society need to worry about. These little bubbles that we get put in of our own creation are what are rapidly accelerating the issue at hand. We are becoming so intolerant of other ideas and different perspectives because of what we are being surrounded by. If we are constantly stuck in a metaphorical echo chamber of our own ideas, it makes us less open to how others might feel about anything.

Imagine that you are told over and over that the only way to have eggs is to have them scrambled, and everyone around you tells you that scrambled eggs are the only acceptable way to have your eggs. You would naturally think that you should only have scrambled eggs, so if someone says that you should try your eggs sunny side up, you would think they are crazy because all you have ever been told is scrambled eggs, and all this other person has been told is sunny side up eggs. Naturally, you would have a disagreement or argument about who is right about the way they eat their eggs, and it would be extremely difficult to do because each side has such different viewpoints of the topic at hand, no willingness to see it differently, and zero tolerance to live with the different ideas.

This is basically how these bubbles we surround ourselves with function, but on a country-wide scale. This is exactly why it is so widespread, because of how much we have used AI algorithms to increase the rate at which we can fully create and surround people with their own personalized bubbles. This makes us as a society less understanding and tolerant of different ideas, beliefs, and ideals. So we are more prone to have arguments and disagreements over a vast quantity of topics, from something as simple as what a band’s best song is to something as serious as how the future of the country should be treated. It is these bubbles that can be so polarizing to not just us but the people around us, too, with how we can deal with differing ideas in a time that we are so divided.

It is essential to being a contributing member of society that we are able to have civil conversations with others about things we disagree on and be able to come to a conclusion that is agreeable for both parties involved. This is a skill that has seen a noticeable decline in more recent years, as these AI-driven algorithms are designed to keep us divided in our own little bubbles where we can pretend that everyone agrees with us and that we all think the same. While it is useful to have these algorithms to help us find entertaining content, it is also equally, if not more, important to take a step back and talk with those with whom we may not agree so that we can retain the essential skill of being able to tolerate those who do not directly agree or oppose what we support or do not support.

In the book Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, he says, “ Yes, computers can gather unprecedented amounts of data on us, watching what we do twenty-four hours a day. And yes, they can identify patterns in the ocean of data with superhuman efficiency. But that does not mean that the computer network will always understand the world accurately. Information isn’t the truth. ”(Harari 255) This very much speaks to the reality that we live in currently, with how much data is processed by AI, whether it be from CHAT GPT, Microsoft Co-pilot, Grok or so many others it doesn’t matter which AI is being used the information is still being processed at a rate that would take normal humans years to do what AI can do in hours. We depend so heavily on what AI tells us that we often take it as a fact, but like Harari says, “Information isn’t truth” (Harari 255). Just because these massive AI companies have all the data and information they could ever want doesn’t mean they know what is true just from the information they have.

Hate is a very powerful and driving force, but more importantly it sells. Hate, outrage, violence they all sell, it constantly dominates the tops of our news feeds why? Because it is attention grabbing it makes you want to be angry which is more easily provoked out of someone who you don’t know that kindness. It is so easy to be angry it is easy to be hateful but that is the problem these AI bots will mass produce hate, anger and chaos because hate sells. You can go on any site and say something completely outlandish that you personally don’t believe in or agree with but because you said it it will get hundreds if not thousands of views, comments, and people who disagree with you will flock to it like shelter in a rainstorm. Which is a scary thought and a scary reflection on us as a society that we would much rather prioritize the horrible things that are happening in our world rather than the selfless acts of kindness that take place every day that are overshadowed by the hate we would much rather spread. It is almost like when a car crash happens everyone wants to get their turn to look at it, that is how we are treating all of the hate that is being spread in the news just another thing for us to get a chance to look at.

Another big issue with AI is that now they are being used to exploit the common person, they are being used to grab and keep our attention, making us spend more and more time on our phones and devices rather than having conversations and talking with other people. That is how we reverse the negative effects of AI and how it pushed us into the bubbles and echo chambers of the things we like, we need to go outside and talk with people who disagree with us it helps us be more tolerant of those around us and bring back the lost skill of having quality face to face conversation with those around us.

One very scary reality with AI whether we recognize it or not is that AI is no longer being used as a tool, instead it is starting to use us as the tool. We have been so caged in by these AIs and the big companies that are using them to treat the user as the product to sell, the AIs we use are designed to capture our attention and to keep us scrolling and to keep us engaged. One of the ways they do that is by promoting outrage and hate like I had discussed early, the other way they do that is by selling your information using the data they gather and turning it against you. In Nexus Harari says ”We are in danger of becoming a sidekick to our own creations.”(Harari 213) This has never been more prevalent in the world than right now, think about how much time collectively we as a society have spent scrolling across all the apps we have it is probably a staggering amount all because it is a competition to the companies that make these apps to see how much time they can get you to lose to these apps. In all honesty you are losing time when you scroll for hours at a time that is valuable time you can never get back that the Ai has tricked you into spending because of how it is designed, it is designed to pray on the weaknesses of the human mind and to exploit them in order to take as much of your time as possible. The product that the media companies have started selling is your time, we have become the product that is being bought and sold specifically with our time and attention.

The initial thought process of having an AI is that it is designed to make some part of our lives easier and for a time it did precisely that. The very first AI systems were very simplistic programs run on super computers that did large-scale computation and mathematics that would have taken a team of people days, if not weeks to accomplish by themselves. That was the very first use of an AI to run large-scale computations, so why is it now that, instead of running computations, it feels like the AI is trying to run our lives? For some parts it very much is, like I mentioned earlier almost every single site or app that has a recommended section or a for-you page largely uses an AI to do that it scans all the videos you`ve watched, re-watched, liked, and shared, and it uses that information to make an algorithm to look all across youtube for example and look for videos that match the data set it created about you and pushes those videos to your home screen for you to see and to keep your engagement up.

The whole process of companies transitioning to a model where they buy and sell people’s time and attention instead of goods and services has been very profitable for those companies, but has greatly negatively impacted the average person, so that we have been trapped by the same AI models that we use to ask questions. This shift in both the marketing and commercial sides of AI is really only benefiting the companies that employ them. We need to be able to resist the urge to go on our phones and scroll, and instead use our time how we want to, whether it be to ride a bike, take a walk, talk to someone, or even just have some time to ourselves without scrolling.

Another thing to constantly be aware of is an AI`s ability to learn; it’s what makes it so good at solving problems and completing tasks, but it is what makes it unpredictable. In Nexus, Harari says, “As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth-telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them. ”(Harari 263) So we are not holding the AI to the standard of being responsible and truthful; it has learned and adapted, which means it knows how to lie while giving you information, so the thing we trust can be feeding us false information that we don’t think to fact-check. The companies running these AI also won’t invest in the self-correcting mechanisms that Harari is talking about because it would be more expensive, and they want to make as much money as possible to continue to boost their profits while spending as little as possible on the product to maximise profits. Another scary detail is that Harari says,” In a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.”(Harari 263) So we are losing the ability to reliably get information that is the truth in a digital age where truth matters now more than ever.

The story of AI and its journey to its present state is not unlike the journey the monster had to go through in Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. An excerpt from Frankenstein says, “I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose. Their pronunciation was quick, and the words they uttered, not having any apparent connection with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application, however, and after having remained during the space of several revolutions of the moon in my hovel, I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse; ”(Shelly Chapter 12) This is like back when AI was very basic and people went in and taught it how to communicate much like how the Monster learned to communicate from observing the family in the cottage. We had to teach AI how to talk, how to compute, and know it gets better and better at it every day, and much like Victor from Frankenstein, we have come to regret our creation and everything that it has caused, both good and bad.

At the end of this essay, I hope I have been able to open your eyes to not just how much we are being herded and shackled by AI, but how we are also being used by the companies that control AI. It doesn’t matter if it is Grok, Copilot, Chat GPT, or any of the other many AI`s out there, remember to take breaks from the bubble that they create around us and talk to someone that thinks differently or has a different perspective on something because we cannot continue to exist in just our bubble or else we lose the tolerance that has allowed us to flourish as a society.

Work Cited

Harari, Y. N. (2024). Nexus: A brief history of information networks from the stone age to Ai. Random House Large Print.

Shelly, M. (n.d.). Frankenstein;. Frankenstein | Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap11