Is this really the word you wanted to associate yourself with? Kevin Costner dances with AI wolves?

The historical associations are obvious and so regrettable as to make the choice oddly provocative in an insulting machismo way. It’s reminiscent of the apparent joy these companies take naming themselves after dystopian concepts like the Metaverse, Palantir, Panopto, etc. And to be clear, this is a self-selected corporate term-of-art on the part of these companies, some marketing vaporware even. This is waking up one morning and just deciding to shoot yourself in the foot.

So, yeah, there are already people living along and well beyond your AI frontier. They mine rare earth minerals, operate as mechanical turks, secure server installations, follow AI directions around warehouses, and so on. They are also the people suffering with the shit AI produces online and on the ground.

Perhaps a rethinking of this metaphor would be a good start to “AI ethics.” At this point though, I use the term because “frontier AI” designates both a recognizable corporate identity and serves as a marker for the Gen AI version of the Californian ideology. There are other English words with some etymological similarity to frontier, like confront, affront, and effrontery. Insulting, shameless AI exist along the affrontier and the effrontier.

Rather than racing to discover what’s in the next valley (as opposed to considering who might be in the next valley), we could give more attention to the way our assemblages produce agential cuts (i.e. “frontiers”). Cuts occur. Our homeostasis is us cutting ourselves off to some degree. Our skin is one frontier, though obviously a porous (and cuttable) one. Our voice is air rushing across and through the frontier of a tube of our skin. (Nancy makes a remark along these lines.) We cannot be opposed to frontiers as such! And yet “frontier AI” suggests exactly that opposition as it breaks down, barrels through, colonizes others in disregard of others in the desire to expand its own frontiers.

When the frontier of a nation expands, we logically ask into what other nation? We must ask the same question of frontier AIs expansive appetite. I mean check out that AI generated image! Shameless!