Opinion | The Year A.I. Became the User and We Became the Tool

As a society, we’ve clearly benefited from promising A.I.-based technologies; this year I was thrilled to read about the ones that might detect breast cancer that doctors miss or let humans decipher whale communications. Focusing on those benefits, however, while blaming ourselves for the many ways that A.I. technologies fail us, absolves the companies behind those technologies — and, more specifically, the people behind those companies.

Events of the past several weeks highlight how entrenched those people’s power is. OpenAI, the entity behind ChatGPT, was created as a nonprofit to allow it to maximize the public interest rather than just maximize profit. When, however, its board fired Sam Altman, the chief executive, amid concerns that he was not taking that public interest seriously enough, investors and employees revolted. Five days later, Mr. Altman returned in triumph, with most of the inconvenient board members replaced.

It occurs to me in retrospect that in my early games with ChatGPT, I misidentified my rival. I thought it was the technology itself. What I should have remembered is that technologies themselves are value neutral. The wealthy and powerful humans behind them — and the institutions created by those humans — are not.

The truth is that no matter what I asked ChatGPT, in my early attempts to confound it, OpenAI came out ahead. Engineers had designed it to learn from its encounters with users. And regardless of whether its answers were good, they drew me back to engage with it again and again. A major goal of OpenAI’s, in this first year, has been to get people to use it. In pursuing my power games, then, I’ve done nothing but help it along.

A.I. companies are working hard to fix their products’ flaws. With all the investment the companies are attracting, one imagines that some progress will be made. But even in a hypothetical world in which A.I.’s capabilities are perfected — maybe especially in that world — the power imbalance between A.I.’s creators and its users should make us wary of its insidious reach. ChatGPT’s seeming eagerness not just to introduce itself, to tell us what it is, but also to tell us who we are and what to think is a case in point. Today, when the technology is in its infancy, that power seems novel, even funny. Tomorrow it might not.