Well, in light of the recent wave of craze among people all over the world focusing on AI, we have spent a whole semester discussing topics around AI and we also researched its functions by actually trying those AI tools. I just realized that those tools that seem very familiar to us that we could almost use by default – such as asking Chatgpt when not sure about the math problem, the demanding Grammarly to improve writing with an AI language model – are not necessarily very familiar to a large amount of people.
There are definitely some limitations that prevent people from accessing the tools that many take for granted. I could think of the following:
- Economic constraint: there are tons of people who cannot afford $10/month for Suno; $20/month for ChatGPT-4; or a display card compatible with stable diffusion even more expensive
- Regulatory and policy barrier: Chinese users need a VPN to use OpenAI products –> folks don’t know how to use a VPN
- Digital literacy: how to phrase the prompt, why and how to train the language model, what is Chat-GPT… it is something that is not so easy self start instead of receiving education
- Language and localization: major tools developed in English or other major languages in mind. what if I cannot read English…
Though one could argue that those people who have difficulty using AI tools might not need to use them in the first place, how AI changed the socioeconomic structure and day-to-day labor force can still generate an effect on those people. There is a saying in Chinese “a grain of sand from the times is like a mountain to an ordinary person’s head” – not to mention AI is more than a grain of sand in this century.
Interestingly, there emerged some social media accounts that teach you about the tools, help you navigate the whole landscape, explain the concepts in plain language, and invite more users to join the conversation. Yes, that was what Yizhou Li, a Chinese influencer was doing last year when ChatGPT first came out. I think Li’s intention was good in breaking the information barriers for the Chinese 1.06 billion social media users and permeating across the board. However, the way he monetarized people’s anxiety about AI and selling AI entry-level courses at $27.50 made the intention less pure. He asserted that he got his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University – so definitely a very successful scholar, who is more of a successful businessman.
According to the social media data analysis site Feigua, Li’s classes were sold over 250,000 times last year, which could have brought in over $6 million in revenue.
In this article, Chinese platforms are cracking down on influencers selling AI lessons, we know that now those classes have been removed from Chinese social media due to customer dissatisfaction about the quality of the class and the more unsettling emotion of understanding how Li sought colossal profits from this. This might reiterate the argument that AI is not for everybody although the OpenAI CEO wants it to benefit the whole mankind. It is colonial in the sense that only a small percentage of people are benefiting from AI while others either don’t.
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