A while ago, I wanted to purchase a skincare product. Somebody highlighted on social media that this product would help my skin type, and like any other person interested in Korean skincare, I wanted to buy it. When it came to the payment, the store only accepted card payments. Unfortunately for me, I had the value in cash and without an ATM or post office nearby, I had to sadly wait a couple of days to come back and buy it again. But during my stroll through central London, I noticed that other stores were also restricting payments to card-only.
Our technological progress has enabled us to explore efficiency. Buying things online, taking cards instead of cash and transferring information faster through AirDrop or other social media. As a society, we are slowly integrating our routine with online activities, be it reading a blog, commenting on a funny video or learning what is happening around us by watching local news online. Almost everything can be integrated into online spaces, which have become digital public areas facilitating global connection and interaction across languages. Like physical spaces, these platforms allow for leisure and meaningful exchanges, enabling activities such as public discourse and chit-chatting. While both forms have limits, physical space is finite; for example, online space can experience technical issues depending on the number of participants, such as in a gaming lobby.
The number of participants they engage determines their power. In the long run, whether a protest originates online or in the streets, its success depends on effectively reaching the target audience, with both spaces often working together to amplify the call for change. Online spaces allow individuals to mobilise efforts to address issues. For example, in Genshin Impact, an RPG (Role-playing Game) fantasy game, its online community went on strike because the company wanted to use its VA’s voices to train AI. In solidarity with the English VAs (Voice actors) seeking to renegotiate their contracts, many players in the community stopped playing the game for an indeterminate period until this problem was addressed.
Although AI can be a handy tool that eases our lives in many professions, where do we draw the line between helping and taking? Where is the limit of assisting a profession and taking over a profession? With the VA strike, they wanted to use the voices of real people who rely on their voices as their income to train AI to take over their roles. And that should not be allowed to happen.
Digital platforms are beneficial for creating new communities and connecting people from all over the world. Having a physical space for community is great; digital platforms do not replace that, they make a new way for that to happen. But as technological advances increase, they move too quickly for our current rules and regulations. An option would be for AI or digital platforms to help us promote a better environment for all individuals in their community by adhering to SDG 16, which promotes peace, justice for all, and inclusive institutions at all levels, without taking a human role or position away from them.
United Nations (2025). Goal 16 | Department of Economic and Social Affairs. [online] sdgs.un.org. Available at: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal16.
Maria Paiva
Fatima
Very good think piece . AI has came to change the world but is it for the better ? I guess we all ask ourselves the same questions as we benefit from it differently.