ChatGPT: The Next Frontier of WMDs

This discussion piece was the culmination of a four-month course on Just Sustainability Design in the tech space, taught by the wonderful Christoph Becker. It came at the precipice of the GenAI movement, after months of popular discourse with ChatGPT, DALLE-2, DeepFakes, and much more in the spotlight. The timing of this was pretty poetic, and I believe much of what I discussed rings true many months later.

This is a solo case study that examines OpenAI’s rise and operational standards through the lens of Cathy O’Neil’s “Weapons of Math Destruction” (WMD) framework. In it, I make the case for ChatGPT being the innovation that ushers in a new wave of technological damage - now with more opacity and scale to show for it! I’d argue that this was a controversial take at the time, with most of the (non-scholarly) discussions taking place coming from a place of excitement and, more than anything, bewilderment about how far we’ve come. Then again, maybe I was just too far in the digital tech-o-sphere to hear the dissenters.

You can find the discussion article here -