Communication in times of Artificial Intelligence: increasing or reducing inequalities?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the paths of communication and its intrinsic relationship with information, as central to the current stage of platform capitalism. We begin by understanding the fields and their importance as organizers and catalysts of contemporary technology, and then analyse the intervention of structures and tools called artificial “intelligence” within digital platforms and their potential consequences for humanity and for the formation of power structures around the world. We present data on the current stage of AI development, as well as data on world hunger and the risks that threaten humanity. Finally, we briefly outline other possible ways of existing. Our process is hermeneutic and is motivated and guided by Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness (2010).

Keywords
Communication; Information; Artificial intelligence; Technology; Market

RESUMO

O presente texto explora os caminhos da comunicação e seu intrínseco relacionamento com a informação, como centrais no estágio de um capitalismo plataformizado. Partimos de uma compreensão dos campos e sua importância como organizadores e catalizadores do contemporâneo tecnológico, para em seguida, analisarmos a interveniência das estruturas e ferramentas denominadas de “inteligência” artificial dentro das plataformas digitais e suas potenciais consequências para a humanidade e para a conformação das estruturas de poder em todo o mundo. Apresentamos dados sobre o estágio atual do desenvolvimento da IA, tanto quanto, dados sobre a fome no mundo e sobre os riscos que ameaçam a humanidade. Ao final, pincelamos, rapidamente, sobre outras possíveis formas de existir. Nosso processo é hermenêutico e tem como motivação e caminho a Hermenêutica da Consciência Histórica de Ricoeur (2010).

Palavras-chave
Comunicação; Informação; Inteligência artificial; Tecnologia; Mercado

RESUMEN

Este texto explora los caminos de la comunicación y su relación intrínseca con la información, como centrales en la etapa del capitalismo de plataforma. Partimos de una comprensión de los campos y su importancia como organizadores y catalizadores de la tecnología contemporánea, para luego analizar la intervención de estructuras y herramientas llamadas “inteligencia” artificial dentro de las plataformas digitales y sus posibles consecuencias para la humanidad y la configuración de las estructuras de poder. Presentamos datos sobre la etapa actual del desarrollo de la IA, así como datos sobre el hambre en el mundo y los riesgos que amenazan a la humanidad. Al final, esbozamos rápidamente otras posibles formas de existir. Nuestro proceso es hermenéutico y su motivación y camino es la Hermenéutica de la Conciencia Histórica de Ricoeur (2010).

Palabras clave
Comunicación; Información; Inteligencia artificial; Tecnología; Mercado

Introduction

Ceci est l’historie d’um crime- du meurtre de la réalité. Et de l’extermination d’une illusion- l’illusion vitale, l’illusion radicale du monde. Le réel ne disparait pans dans l’illusion, c’est l’illusion qui disparait la réalité intégrale¹

Jean Baudrillard (1995)

The idea that permeates the guiding thread of this paper goes through communication coupled with technology in the evolution of media supports, as a vector for expanding horizons and that has, from late modernity to the present day, driven experiences in time, for communities socially and educationally included in the Western mold. However, it is necessary to emphasize that there are other possibilities of experiences in time that do not have technology as the main driver of life.

In this sense, we begin by bringing communication, as a central field in the technological ecosystem that imposes new and disruptive ways of existing. Communication, as Sodré thinks, both as a post-disciplinary science that constitutes the common communicated, “[...] as the field that reveals itself as one of the main organizational forms of our contemporary world” (Sodré, 2014, p.14). Communication as a catalyst within a complex digital world that is structured in systems of production, circulation and consumption hyperlinked to each other, which end up constituting the communication society and the information society, both overlapping.

Considering information as a concept that coe This is the story of a crime – the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion – the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. Reality does not disappear entirely in illusion, it is illusion that makes the whole reality disappears with communication, we can visualize it in two senses. The first one, strictly technical or technological: information as a measurable quantity (data) (Sodré, 2014, p. 23) and the second, qualitative sense, linked to the role of information as control and redundancy within communication systems. Here, information is related to organization, structure and regulation within systems. Information as a means of organizing and stabilizing systems, where repetition (redundancy) ensures the integrity of information in communication (SODRÉ, 2014).

That said, it is worth highlighting what has been consolidated over the last few decades as information and communication technologies in which today, the capture, “mining” and processing of data condense the flows of human experience transformed into information capital, sold daily in and by the platform/technological structures that abduct our attention. In this path, communication and information go hand in hand and make up the central system of technologies that interact with humanity through platforms and that are called primitive or generative artificial “intelligence”, which, in turn, are tools of capital. For many, such technologies are in a post-human or antihuman stage.

As Sodré (2014, p.20-21) rightly says, “[...] in the global scope of technoscience, technological forms of transmission and encoding of signals place communication at the center of an anthropological metamorphosis, which some analysts of the phenomenon have called post-humanism”, a phenomenon treated by Sadin (2020) in the current context of platformization of life as anti-humanism, but which has previous approaches by Heidegger (2010) and Nietzsche (2011) that discuss the post-humanist phenomenon.

On the other hand, the exploitation of the human in the context of what Zuboff (2020) calls surveillance capitalism, a topic that we have already discussed in other papers, and which uses various strategies of the action economy to attract attention, aiming to exercise control over consumption, over the media diet and the forms of sociability and affection; converges with what Baudrillard (1995) at the end of the 20th century, pointed out as the perfect crime, in which the media and technology promote a simulation, in which reality is so saturated by representations (or simulations) that the distinction between the real and the false dissolves. Thus, the perfect crime is one in which reality is murdered without leaving a trace, without anyone noticing or being able to prove that something real has been lost, because what was real has been completely replaced by simulations (Baudrillard, 1995). Today’s perfect crime includes users as “illusionaries” and digital platforms as illusionists, which, when capturing the human experience, transform it into a product to which other products (tangible, intangible, ideological, etc.) are sold that theoretically reinforce their tastes and interests. Reality is reduced to what is seen and consumed, with the awareness that algorithmic structures only allow the eye to find content that can be profitable for the platforms. It is worth noting that viral content is precisely the one which triggers human emotions and affections.

Communication, therefore, alongside information, makes up the core of the technological society that, through interconnectivity, imposes new sociabilities, diverting affections and creating compulsive and pathological responses to the imposing appeal that technology makes to us daily. The transformations are guided, mainly, by the economic field with the intensification of disparities between the Northern and Southern hemispheres, between those included and those peripheral to the techno-market system. In this complex context of neocapitalism and neocolonialism, the potentialization of domination that is structured on the ontological, epistemological and power tripod, takes on new contours.

There is an illusion of political empowerment but, in reality, we are moving towards an ethical narrowing that weakens the political field devoid of criticality and humanity, within a technological society, monopolized by simplistic attractions regarding meaning and knowledge, and which reach us through the culture capitalist digital technology.

Chronos and the contemporaries of platformized life

In this imperious arrow of time that moves towards entropy and chaos, as Hawking (2015) says, there are nuances that need to be revealed beyond what is easily identifiable by the attentive observer of the contemporary world.

First, it is imperative to observe the mutation in technological structures that are guided by a constant improvement in the capital mobility pathways that impose an intermittent process of improvement in business models. These mutations are causing a migration from technologies that advise humans in their (predatory) domination over nature to integral cognitive technologies that, according to Zizek (2023, n/p), represent the human renunciation of control. For this author, “[...] the traditional anthropocentric arrogance that technology enables may soon give way to human irrelevance and meaninglessness.”

Cognitive technologies refer to digital systems and tools that are capable of performing tasks that traditionally require human cognitive abilities, such as learning, reasoning, decision-making, pattern recognition, and understanding of natural language. These technologies use advanced artificial “intelligence” (AI) techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), artificial neural networks, and others, to mimic or augment human cognitive processes.

To help us visualize the stage of advances in cognitive technologies, it is worth mentioning that in October 2024, 40 researchers from 15 institutions in several countries presented a model of generative artificial “intelligence” that is capable of simulating and predicting human behavior in any context. The model, called Centaur-70B, was trained by a database called Psych101 that combines information collected from 160 psychological experiments with 60,092 participants, who together made more than 10 million decisions (Binz et al., 2024).

The fact is that cognitive technologies have become “integral” and “exponential time” technologies, as discussed by Eric Sadin (2020), that is, a type of technology that aims to encompass and control in a totalizing manner all spheres of human and social life, in a time marked by accelerated technological growth. This idea of “integral” implies a comprehensive and global scope, where technology not only performs specific or limited functions, but seeks to integrate itself completely into all aspects of existence, shaping behaviors, decisions and even the way we perceive and interact with the world.

This process leads us to what Sadin (2020) calls an anthropomorphism of technology, and which Sodré (2002, 2014) also mentions in different contexts. This would be a stage in which technologies not only perform specific functions or assist human beings, but also assume characteristics and capabilities that were previously exclusively human. In this era, technology acquires a central role in social, cultural and economic life, profoundly influencing the way we live, think and interact.

The “anthropomorphic” notion suggests that technologies begin to resemble humans in their abilities of perception, decision-making, and action. Sadin (2020) argues that, in the anthropomorphic era of technique, technology is no longer just a tool we use, but an entity that begins to act autonomously, making decisions, learning, and interacting with us in ways that simulate human behavior. This era marks a transformation in the relationship between humans and technology, where technology begins to occupy a space previously reserved for humans, challenging our notions of identity, autonomy, and ethics.

In Zizek’s (2023) view, it is not about a technology that has come to replace us, but a technology to which we are granting the power to replace us, which can modify both the character of the human, as well as nature and the divine. For Zizek (2023, n/p) “[...] Our identity as humans can exist only against the background of impenetrable nature, but if life becomes something that can be fully manipulated by technology, it will lose its ‘natural’ character.”

According to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Index Report (2024), in the field of medicine, for example, something extremely positive is the finding that the 2023 prominent model, GPT-4 Medprompt, achieved a diagnostic accuracy rate of 90.2%, which can help the physician in their work. Nevertheless, the physician must perform the anamnesis and enter the collected information to train the generative model. However, when the model is collecting data directly from the patient, on social media or other channels, it may no longer need the intervention of the human physician to provide a diagnosis. What will the consequences be for human health? What will the consequences be for medicine?

In this context, the potentiality of the truth, the alethic potentiality of machinic “intelligence” emphasized by Sadin (2020), but already found in Heidegger (2010) in a paper on the issue of technology, reverberates, in our view, an exacerbation of the human will to power that we find in Nietzsche (2011), since, for this philosopher, the will to power/potentiality is a fundamental and multifaceted concept that describes the essential driving force of all living beings. It would be, in short, the inherent drive of human beings to grow, assert themselves, expand their abilities and, ultimately, create and dominate. It does not refer only to a desire for power in the political or social sense, but rather to a vital force that drives development and achievement. Therefore, the alethic power of machines, as a creation of the human being, is located in the will to power of the human being themselves, but with the possibility of overpowering them.

The digital world has the ability to collect, process, and present information in unprecedented ways, revealing patterns, behaviors, and data that were previously invisible or difficult to detect. This unveiling of hidden realities gives digital technology a transformative power over society, culture, and politics. At the same time, there is a great danger in this power, as it not only reveals but also shapes and constructs new realities, profoundly influencing our perceptions, decisions, and, ultimately, our truth (Sadin, 2020). Therefore, the “alethic potentiality” of digital technology, as the ability of digital cognitive technologies to reveal and create new truths, would also have the ability to change the course of knowledge construction and intervene in the processes of epistemological, ontological, and power domination.

This truth constructed by an imposition of a technological time has another entry for policies and games of truth (Foucault, 2010, 2011), given that it considers the interaction that happens beyond human intervention and manipulation and is constituted from the appropriation of realities by machinic “intelligence”.

Ethics, whose crisis was denounced by Morin (2005) some time ago, is becoming increasingly narrow, definitively leaving the collective sphere and transforming into a personal vector linked to progress and success in the techno-market capitalist environment, dissociated from scientific knowledge and based on experience without historical basis.

Therefore, in this technological environment in which two structures of artificial “intelligence” work, namely: the algorithmic structure that lies in the opacity of digital platforms and defines consumption, sociability and guides affections, and the other one, which has a face of direct dialogue with users, called generative artificial “intelligence” nowadays; what occurs is what Sadin (2020) calls the agony of the political field, that is, the weakening and loss of relevance of traditional structures of political power in a world increasingly dominated by digital technologies and technocratic logics that reconfigure the way society is organized and governed.

It is worth considering that this exacerbation of the discrediting of the political field was already denounced in contexts of totalitarianism in the 20th century by philosopher Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (2009), as well as in The Human Condition (2016) and in On Violence (2021). In the first book mentioned, Arendt (2009, p.175) identifies the initial stage of the political domination of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist forms, and details that “[...] private interests, which by their very nature are temporary, (...) can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from it that infinite duration of time necessary for continuous accumulation”. This would lead to a preponderance of the private over the public.

Marilena Chauí (2019, n/p) lucidly bridges the gap between the current stage of neoliberal capitalism and a new form of totalitarianism, based on the idea of an administered society. “The movement of capital transforms any and all reality into an object of and for capital, converting everything into a commodity [...]”. In this context, everything is transformed into companies: churches, schools, cultural centers, hospitals, and even the State, which abandons democratic values, thus ceasing to be a public institution and becoming something hybrid and interrelated to the market and economic interests.

In the platformized world, the agony of politics permeates both what Arendt and Chauí bring, as it has as its driving focus a rhetoric guided by algorithmic structures, which in turn are trained to capitalize on big Tech, that is, a social rhetoric guided by technological capitalism that gives visibility to whatever has potential to go viral and that provides profitability and, to this end, reverberates the worst that exists in terms of human values and affections, capable of running faster through the information highways.

This rhetoric, guided by platformized algorithmic structures that prioritize content with the potential to go viral, materializes as a meeting between the interests of technological capitalism and the uses and appropriations made by users of the political, ideological, and market fields, aiming to increase the reach of their messages among the target audiences. That is when, for Eric Sadin (2020), the concept of “rhetorical coup d’état” arises, which refers to a profound and silent transformation in the forms of power and social control, carried out through the strategic use of language, discourse, and narrative manipulation, instead of a traditional seizure of power through force or a military coup. This strategy, although not new, has new contours and has brought up a reconfiguration of the global geopolitical space, as democracy retreats and dictatorial/totalitarian regimes advance.

Here we consider it important to highlight the results found through the 2024 survey by the V-DEM Institute, from the University of Gothenburg. The v-DEM index highlights the 60 countries that held elections in 2024, of which 42 countries would be in the process of autocratization and 18 would be in the process of democratization. Among the latter is Brazil, whose population comprises more than half of all those that are returning to democratic paths. It is worth considering that, among the 42 countries in the process of autocratization is India, which holds 18% of the world’s population.

The common thread that runs through most of the countries investigated and identified by the research is precisely the inherent role of platforms in the social context and their appropriation and use by far-right and, in certain cases, far-left political factions. Obviously, in this environment, it is not a matter of thinking about or affirming technological determinism, but of perceiving the encounter between the interests of technological capital and the uses and appropriations by the political field, now invaded by forms of action that deny it, as in the case of the Orban’s or Bolsonaro’s illiberalism (Sodré, 2021).

Yuval Harari (2024) presents a perspective on political regimes based on how information networks are structured, which would be totally different between democracies and dictatorships. This historian draws attention to the historical alternation between the two opposing political regimes (democracy or dictatorships) that would not only be motivated by social contexts averse to each of the regimes mentioned in given temporalities. In his view, the contexts of technological influx of information have provided and continue to provide opportunities for such changes to take place.

Technological singularity, therefore, enters political and geopolitical processes as a driving force of the capitalist system to shape and provoke consequences in power structures. Such a singularity occurs in this speculative moment in which machines are causing unpredictable and rapid changes, with profound impacts on society. It is also worth considering that, when we speak of current machines/technologies, we are referring not only to the hardware and/or software themselves, but mainly to the large technological corporations that concentrate the structure of current capitalism and that shape such structures and tools. Therefore, it is not a matter of technological neutrality, in which we do not believe, but of market intentions.

The scenario

The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024², published by the Human-Centered at Stanford University’s, presents a diagnosis of the current stage of development of programs called GenAI - Generative Artificial Intelligence, highlighting the advances of the last decade. According to the report, in the last ten years there has been an exponential growth of this type of technology and, in this process of acceleration of generative models, the year 2023 represents a milestone in which state-of-the-art systems such as GPT-4³, Gemini⁴ and Claude⁵ have shown remarkable results. These models are capable of creating clear texts with well-developed arguments in several languages, in addition to being able to work with audiovisual media and images.

The emergence of AI in the markets has led to a boom in the development of specific models and tools in a variety of niches, from finance to journalism, science and medicine. However, the report points out that the tools still have problems that should be considered with caution, since they are still “unable to reliably handle facts, perform complex reasoning, or explain their conclusions” (AIIR, Stanford, 2024).

Another highlight of the Stanford Report refers to concerns about the future of technology involving generative models. In this sense, when analyzing the research information, two interrelated visions of the future emerge, namely: on the one hand, the constant and ever-changing technological/market inexorability caused by the advance of technology on life in general, which makes the necessary advances and the scope of consumption apparently irreversible in the digitally included West.

The second vision that sheds light on a possible expectation deals with possible uses and appropriations. The Report highlights that the technology under development may be used for good or for evil, as if highlighting a possible neutrality of generative tools, which we disagree with, considering that the essence of technology is not technical (HEIDEGGER, 2010). Here it is necessary to consider that, the human appropriation of technologies can be converted into different uses based on different intentions, which can lead to good or bad use and, therefore, bring good or bad social consequences. However, the Report does not highlight or at least does not make it clear that we must consider the locus of development of such technological models and their direct market interests, which make humanity not only the main capital in negotiation between big Techs and other markets, but also make us hostages of a technological process that, apparently, has the power to intervene in the social world.

An important piece of information to consider the intentions behind the development of pre-trained generative models, as revealed by the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, is the fact that the market/industry sector is hegemonic in scientific research and in the development of AI tools. In 2023, the industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023 (AIIR, Stanford, 2024).

Finally, the data highlighted by the Stanford Report reveals that the United States leads the market, followed by China, the European Union and the United Kingdom as the market for the largest development of cutting-edge AI models. In 2023, 61 notable AI models originated from US-based institutions, far surpassing European models. In this race, 21 were developed in the European Union and 15 in China.

This scenario revealed by researchers at Stanford University converges with the advances of artificial “intelligence” in the societies included. As previously mentioned, this technology is already inserted in social contexts based on the algorithmic architecture of platforms in their various areas of activity, as well as from AI models that have brought great benefits to humanity, ranging from a geolocation application that allows us precise mobility in places we do not know, for example, to artificial “intelligence” tools that are used to identify diseases long before they can manifest symptoms in people or can be detected by conventional devices for detecting physical pathologies.

However, the power that such technologies have to solve society’s problems does not seem to go hand and hand with the rights that everyone should have. Furthermore, considering their creation from a neo-capitalist market, the risks of increasing already glaring inequalities are shown with greater clarity and potentiality.

So: AI for whom? Possible risks and consequences

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI)⁶ report, released in July 2024 by five specialized agencies linked to the United Nations (UN), revealed that 733 million people went hungry in 2023.

The findings of this Report are glaring and show that the world has worsened in many indicators, which represent the increase in poverty and the lack of basic rights for a large part of the world’s population. Malnutrition has returned to the levels of 2008-2009 and access to adequate food, according to the Report, “[...] remains unattainable for billions of people”.

Moderate or severe food insecurity affects 2.33 billion people worldwide. The most common areas of food insecurity are the global South. In Africa, the number of people suffering from hunger is growing rapidly, to around 20.4%. In Asia, the rate remains stable, with around 8.1% of people experiencing severe food insecurity. In Latin America, around 6.2% of individuals are experiencing hunger. Between 2022 and 2023, hunger increased in Western Asia, the Caribbean and most African sub regions.

This scenario takes place in a world where the wealthiest 1% have captured almost 2/3 of all global wealth generated since 2020, or approximately US$42 trillion. This means about 6 times more resources than 90% of the global population (7 billion people) managed to obtain in the same period. This data is from the report “Survival” of the richest – how we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality”, launched by OXFAM at the World Economic Forum meeting in 2023, in Davos.

In this context of exploitation of a platformized and exclusionary neocapitalism, it is also worth mentioning data on the capital and profitability of digital platforms in recent years. According to Dantas (2023), in 2022, the operating revenue of the technology giant led by Lary Page and Sergey Brin, Alphabet/Google, was US$282.8 billion and its net profit was around US$60 billion. The operating revenue of Mark Zuckerberg’s Google was approximately US$116.6 billion and its net profit was US$23.2 billion. In 2023, Alphabet’s revenues totaled US$307.4 billion and Meta’s, US$134.9 billion. Alphabet’s net profit was US$73.8 billion and Meta’s, US$39.1 billion (Dantas, 2024). For comparison purposes, “[...] Brazil’s positive trade balance (let’s say, Brazil’s “net profit”) was USD 99 billion” (DANTAS, 2024).

As for Chinese big Tech, ByteDance, owner of the TikTok, saw real growth of 60%⁷ in 2023, rising from US$25 billion in 2022 to over US$40 billion in 2023, becoming the most valuable startup in the market, worth US$225 billion. Elon Musk’s Space X and OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, are also in the same ranking. In this context, TikTok surpassed Facebook as the most valuable social media brand in the world in 2023, according to the ranking by the consultancy Brand Finance⁸. The brand of Mark Zuckerberg’s company lost 42% in the period analyzed, while the brand of ByteDance’s social media network saw its value grow by 11.4%. The TikTok brand is valued at US$65.69 billion (R$341.50 billion) compared to US$58.98 billion (R$306.64 billion) in 2023.

In this antagonistic context that opposes capital and societies and that can be represented in several chapters of human history on this planet, it must be considered that the promises that the disruptive technology of the moment will save humanity and the planet that is in agony seem to be difficult to achieve, given that the interests of capital govern human actions around the exploitation of others, causing wars, immigration and increasing hunger and the exploitation of Gaia’s natural resources.

The Navigating News Horizons Report: a global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing⁹, published by the United Nations Environment Programme-UNEP in July 2024, presents the main concerns about ongoing climate change, among which it is worth mentioning what they call accelerators of the environmental crisis:

1. The recurrent demand for rare earth elements and essential minerals and metals is expected to increase fourfold by 2040[...]. 2. The melting of permafrost on a warming planet, which could release ancient organisms that could be pathogenic, resulting in major impacts on the environment, animals and humans. 3. Digital transformation and AI can bring benefits, but there are environmental implications [...] The use of AI in weapons systems and the development of synthetic biology need careful review with an environmental lens. 4. The rise of armed conflict and violence. These conflicts result in ecosystem degradation and pollution, leading to repercussions for vulnerable populations. 5. The Diasporas: Forced displacement is increasing impacts on the environment and human health. One in 69 people is now forcibly displaced. Conflict and climate change are among the main drivers of this change; 6. Growth of misinformation to the detriment of truth, which has led to increased political polarization in several countries, among other critical points [...]

(RNNH, PNUMA, 2024, p. 1-9).

Finally, it is worth considering that the accelerators of possible critical global changes observed by the UNEP Report as possible triggers of extreme events that permeate the climate and reach the daily lives of populations are largely in line with the risks highlighted by the World Economic Forum research released in January 2024 and which identified and listed as risks for the next ten years: 1. Extreme climate events; 2. Critical changes in Earth’s systems; 3. Loss of biodiversity and collapse of ecosystems; 4. Scarcity of natural resources; 5. Disinformation and false information; 6. Adverse results of Artificial Intelligence technologies; 7. Involuntary migration; 8. Cybersecurity; 9. Social polarization and 10. Pollution(GRR, WEF, 2024)¹⁰.

Inference

Is there life outside the technological realm in which we find ourselves immersed? It seems so, and that these possibilities of life would be true life and where the power of humanity’s horizons would reside, reiterating here what (Krenak, 2022) and Kopenawa (2015) address.

Other possibilities of existing based on co-presence and relationships with the land and nature, found in Bispo (2023), also offer distinct forms of relationships between humans and the environment. The countercolonialism propagated by this author and quilombola leader speaks of the appreciation of diversity and difference that opposes the historical impositions of exploitation of territories and peoples by a Western culture that wishes to remain dominant.

Up until now, at least, technological innovations have largely served to improve the market experiences of the societies involved, but on the other hand, they have exacerbated inequalities between nations and peoples of the North and the South. Hunger is spreading and mutations in the structure of nature that governs Gaia are intensifying. However, resilience and resistance remain. This is not the end of the story, since there is hope, as in Freire, a hope that is also action (FREIRE, 1987).

Finally, we believe that, although technological advances that make life easier for those with financial resources to access technology are real, including in the area of health, two situations must be considered eventually: 1. Such advances mainly favor a market structure that increases inequalities among human beings and, to date, has not solved the problems of hunger. On the contrary, in many cases, it has increased them, since it invests in the accumulation and not in the distribution of financial resources. 2. Technological advances have as a backdrop the materiality of the planet, which has already been exhaustively explored and is in an advanced stage of depletion of its natural reserves. Technological independence depends on rare elements such as lithium, which is used to manufacture batteries for self-driving cars and other equipment. Data centers, euphemistically called clouds, use large amounts of water, both for system maintenance and every time a person asks a question to a pre-trained generative model. Therefore, unfortunately, we believe that, to date, AI is not yet at the service of reducing inequalities.

• Funding:
  CNPq
  This text is the result of research conducted with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (Ibict).
• Double-Blind System
• How to Cite:
  Rêgo, Ana Regina. Communication in times of artificial intelligence: expansion or reduction of inequalities? INTERCOM - Brazilian Journal of Communication Sciences, 48, e2025102. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-58442025102pt.
• This text was prepared based on the Opening Conference of the Study Cycles of the 47th INTERCOM Congress, held in September 2024 in Balneário Camboriú, SC.
• Article submitted to similarity systems.
• 1
  This is the story of a crime – the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion – the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. Reality does not disappear entirely in illusion, it is illusion that makes the whole reality disappear. (personal translation).
• 2
  Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024. Available at :< https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/>. Accessed on Oct 4, 2024.
• 3
  OpenAI Pre-Trained Generative Model.
• 4
  Alphabet Inc./Google’s Artificial “Intelligence” Assistant.
• 5
  Chatbot – Linguistic Model AI developed by Anthropic.
• 6
  The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). Available at: <https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/the-state-of-foodsecurity-and-nutrition-in-the-world-2024 >. Accessed on Aug 20, 2024.
• 7
  TikTok: lucro anual da ByteDance salta 60% . Available at:< https://olhardigital.com.br/2024/04/10/pro/tiktok-lucro-anual-da-bytedancesalta-60/>. Accessed on Aug 22, 2024.
• 8
  TikTok é a marca de rede social mais valiosa do mundo em 2023. Available at:< https://forbes.com.br/forbes-money/2023/01/tiktok-e-amarca-de-rede-social-mais-valiosas-do-mundo-em-2023/>. Accessed on Aug 15, 2024.
• 9
  Navigating News Horizons: a global foresight report on planetary report health and human wellbeing. Available at: < https://www.unep.org/ resources/global-foresight-report >. Accessed on Aug 15, 2024.
• 10
  Global Risk ReporT, 2024. WEF. Available at: < https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2024/>. Accessed on May 10, 2024.

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Edited by

• Chief Editors:
  Dr. Marialva Barbosa
  Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ
  Dr. Sonia Virginia Moreira
  State University of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ

• Executive Editors:
  Dr. Jorge C. Felz Ferreira
  Federal University of Juiz de Fora, UFJF
  Dr. Ana Paula Goulart de Andrade
  Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRRJ

• Associate Editor:
  Dr. Sandro Torres de Azevedo
  Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  27 June 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  25 Nov 2024
• Accepted
  10 Jan 2025
• Published
  03 Apr 2025