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So, while the Mediterranean is burning, the Global South is devastated by the effects of climate change with millions of lives on the line, the Design Council UK sends a newsletter titled: 'Can AI save the planet?', publishing ChatGPT article prompted by the question 'Can #Design save the planet?' accompanied by a DALL-E generated image that looks like the architecture dystopian renders that colonise the web since the beginning of the 2000s
1/
Let's start by answering some questions that apparently the Design Council deems very important and profound:
'Can AI save the planet?'
No. AI is an advance statistic computational tool, while the environmental crisis is a socio-political problem that has less to do with stats and more to do with culture.
'Can ChatGPT solve the climate crisis?'
No. It's a chatbot and a BS generator, as @ct_bergstrom , @emilymbender @alex, @danmcquillan among others keep repeating
2/
@alx@mastodon.designAnd than there is THE question:
'Can Design save the planet?'
Well, no, the simple fact that #designers need to ask it to a chatbot is enough to prove that #design is a practice and a discipline with poor understanding of reality and a self-aggrandising idea of itself. In its current form, design is an industrial, capitalist, neoliberal practice that serves the brief commissioned by the 1%. And apparently, designers don't even understand the design of AI.
3/
Which is no surprise, considering that the most of #design process is creating useless and often malfunctioning products for people who are reduced to users, modelled on personas built upon biased assumptions of the design team.
Now, I know for sure there are some designers that are desperately trying to change this. But it looks like, we're very very far from even scratching the surface of it.
Gosh, today my inbox is an endless source of rants.
4/end of rant?
That Design Council article is depressing. Not only is just a rhetorical pastiche of empty suggestions that don't interrogate any structural problem at the root of the environmental crisis, but it is also the sad evidence of the hollow understanding designers have of #design and themselves, giving up their own creativity to surrender to a word soup disguised as suggestion from a stats machine.
5/end of rant?
@alx please, keep on ranting, this is spot on. I spent years designing thoughtful, considered, accessible websites for corporate shitbags who just wanted to make money