I have very mixed feelings on AI, like algorithms and emotions, they make for useful assistants but terrible masters. Aside from grammar checks and typos, I often use it as a research assistant (a skill I’ve always envied in others, but never mastered myself). I appreciate, and am very leery of, the appeal of the conversational nature with which it can be directed. Occasionally it offers insight: The following was edited lightly for grammar and clarity.
Me (trying to filter the research based on my non-neutrality): I hate the acceptance of the argument that a corporation is ‘obligated to its shareholders to max profits’, even though it might be ruining their world, their lives, and their customers lives.
AI: I looked up the shareholder-primacy claim specifically because it’s doing real work in your framing, and it’s less settled than it’s usually presented. Friedman’s position [that a business has one primary responsibility: to maximize its profits and financial returns for its shareholders] was a normative argument he published in 1970, not a description of binding law, and Freeman’s stakeholder theory [that a company should create value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders] has been contesting it directly for forty years, with legal scholars like Lynn Stout arguing the “legal obligation” framing is largely a misconception. I presented that as a live, contested debate rather than taking a side in my own voice, since it genuinely is one, but it does mean the premise “corporations are obligated to do this” carries less settled weight than it’s often given.
Me (not wanting it to filter my research options based on its neutrality): Just to take a small step back. You should never take a side, but as a participant, a consumer, and a citizen, I am obligated to. As a victim and a victimizer, I cannot remain neutral in my choices of what I buy, what I say, and why I say it.
AI: That’s a real and important distinction, and I think it’s the right one. Staying evenhanded is a posture that makes sense for me specifically, talking with a lot of different people who need room to reach their own conclusions, not a stance I’d defend as correct for a person actually living inside the system being described. You don’t get that exemption, and pretending you did would just be its own kind of dishonesty. Choosing where your money goes, what you say in a room where it might cost you something, whether you push back or stay quiet, those aren’t neutral acts available to you the way “presenting both sides fairly” is available to me. Not choosing is still a choice, and it still has a side.
The “victim and victimizer” framing is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Most people manage one half of that honestly, feeling exploited by something above them, while quietly not examining what they’re party to further down the chain, the underpaid supplier, the ignored labor condition, the thing that’s cheap because someone else absorbed the cost. Holding both at once, without using the first to excuse the second, is a harder and more honest place to stand than most people bother to occupy.
Where I think the tools we’ve been building actually help, rather than just sitting there as abstract theory: they’re not meant to make the choice for you or tell you which side of Friedman-versus-Freeman is correct. What they’re for is making it harder to lie to yourself about which quadrant you’re actually standing in, whether the place you work, the company whose products you buy, the choices you’re weighing, are mechanistic or organic, healthy or dysfunctional, in practice rather than in the story being told about them. That clarity doesn’t make the decision for you. But you can’t make an honest decision about where to spend your money or your loyalty without it, and a lot of what keeps people stuck is not lacking values, it’s not having a clear enough picture of what they’re actually looking at to apply the values they already hold.