Is all AI bad?
I found your treatment of AI really interesting (NI 560) – many thanks for a fascinating issue. I was however quite surprised that your focus seemed essentially restricted to AI development through the mega IT companies based in the West. It’s not my area of expertise, but some commentators such as Jan Krikke, in a recent Asia Times article, have differentiated developments in China. Krikke compared a Western approach – based on AI as ‘an amplifier of markets, innovation and individual agency, letting private firms and open competition drive progress while minimizing centralized direction’ – to a different approach in China. He suggested their approach was different in actively integrating AI ‘to improve industries, manage public services, ensure social stability and promote national independence through planned strategies’.
The importance of Chinese activity in the AI field seems quite visible. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company which has provided its open-source AI model, apparently became the top-rated free application available in the United States and worldwide, overtaking ChatGPT last January – and there is a new version coming out this Lunar New Year. Again Krikke asserts that as of 2023, 47 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers had completed their undergraduate studies in China.
The only mention of China that I noticed in your articles however was a reference by Adio-Adet Dinika that the profits made from cheap labour in the countries of the global majority are ‘centralized in Silicon Valley and Beijing’.
I would be interested in New Internationalist’s view as to whether AI is the ‘same the world over’ or whether there are alternative models and perspective for the use of this technology (and indeed whether there is the same ‘human cost’ irrespective of the different motives in the countries concerned).
A pleasure to be featured
It was a pleasure to see several pages from my graphic history created with illustrator Summer McClinton featured in the March-April 2026 edition. The full work appears as a chapter in Partisans (Between the Lines, 2025), available online and in bookstores, or as a standalone comic via print on demand at a.nin.tl/Feinberg. An eBook edition for Apple Books and Kindle arrives in June 2026.
Mind your Zs!
After reading Decca Muldowney’s otherwise excellent article, ‘AI and its discontents’ (NI 560), I couldn’t help feeling a little indignant at the sight of so many words spelt the American way.
In just one sentence I notice ‘depoliticization, atomization, polarization and personalization’, incidentally all of which my iPhone spellcheck function detected.
I understand that the majority of New Internationalist readers are from the UK, so can’t we spell these words ‘-ise’?
As a long-term reader having put up with this for decades, this particular instance is the last straw: I’m vexed!
The editors write: While is it a common belief that -ize is an Americanism and the British is -ise, for most verbs either way is correct in British English. The -ize ending has been in use in English since the 16th century. If the word came into English with its origin in the Greek root -izo, then it can be spelt -ize. New Internationalist follows the Oxford English Dictionary for spelling in its house style.
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