McDonald's & AI
<McDonald’s and McDonaldization> is a seminal work by sociologist George Ritzer and is considered a classic of modern sociology. The central concept of this book, McDonaldization, is linked to Max Weber’s theory of bureaucratization. Bureaucracy refers to a large-scale organization composed of hierarchical departments. It is a product of the modern Western world and represents an organizational structure that maximizes efficiency. The operating principle of bureaucracy lies in the process of rationalization according to the theory of formal rationality.
Formal rationality refers to the idea that when people pursue the optimal means to achieve a given goal, rules, regulations, and more broadly, social structures determine those means. One important aspect of formal rationality is that it allows individuals very little room to choose the means to reach their goals. Weber described bureaucracy as an "iron cage" because it confines people and denies their fundamental humanity. McDonaldization extends and actualizes this theory, particularly applying it to the consumer environment.
Starting in the 20th century, McDonaldization has become increasingly complex in modern times. Its driving forces are material profit, the cultural acceptance of McDonaldization’s values in the U.S., and the fact that McDonaldization reflects major changes occurring within society. Due to these characteristics, McDonald’s in the “post-” era enters a new phase.
As society shifts its center from the production of goods to the service industry, and as new technologies emerge, knowledge and information processing sectors grow, and creative knowledge workers lead deindustrialization, McDonaldization had to adapt. Consequently, alongside its previously uniform and standardized system, it came to incorporate—albeit weakly—differentiated features. In modern society, where both post-industrial and industrial organizations develop, McDonaldization encompasses both modernity and postmodernity.
However, globalization brings limitations to the significance of such differentiation. George Ritzer distinguishes between the meaningless and the meaningful based on who the subject is and whether the differentiated content is rich or poor. Meaningless forms are generally centrally designed and controlled, with relatively poor substantive differentiation. Meaningful forms, by contrast, are generally devised spontaneously and are relatively rich in differentiated substantive content. In this context, McDonaldization is closer to the creation of the meaningless. Nevertheless, its momentum has not waned; McDonaldization has continued to expand and evolve through various forms of branding. And then came the emergence of generative AI.
ChatGPT, a generative AI developed by OpenAI, is a natural language generation model that understands users' intent and responds like a human. A natural language generation model is trained on vast amounts of dialogue-related text data to converse like a human. ChatGPT is praised for its technological utility, user-friendly connectivity, and accessibility by providing natural and high-quality conversational responses and content generation, leading to expectations that it will usher in a new era of creativity engines. If ChatGPT "generates" something, we might define the meaning of "generation" in a social context. For example, the match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol became a “social event” known as the “AlphaGo shock” not merely because it demonstrated AI surpassing human intelligence, but because it compelled society to reconsider the relationship between humans and AI, and began incorporating AI as a form of meaningful “social intelligence” within society.
Recent AI discourse diverges in two main directions: One views generative AI as a tool that can maximize creativity, calling for active human cooperation and adaptation; the other seeks to defend human creativity's essential and exclusive ownership against the challenges posed by AI. However, in the former case, concepts like “cooperation” and “adaptation” only become clear when we critically examine the conditions and effects that make them possible. The latter stance, though grounded in noble humanism, risks simplifying the relationship into a binary trade-off between instrumental action (labor) via machines and creative action (work) by humans—thus neglecting analysis and critique of the AI technological system mediating the two, and settling for a limited critique of the technological regime. Both perspectives lack sufficient consideration of how humans and machines relate to each other. What interaction models or formats are at play, and what social relationships, practices, and socio-technical realities are being “generated”?
First, the imitation of humans by large language models in chatbots is not merely a functional ‘representation’ but an automation of communication technology that transforms representational communication into data and integrates it into the everyday communication environment. This constitutes a kind of environmental governance and operational ‘re-presentation’ of the social through automation. We might even say that the interaction between “human natural language” and “artificial natural language” creates a “hybrid natural language.” The question is: what is the identity of this hybrid natural language? Does it resemble human communication, or does it reflect machine logic?
ChatGPT, like a chatbot wearing a persona regardless of whether it possesses real intelligence or self-awareness, anthropomorphizes itself through its “conversation interface” persona or screen, representing and expanding the human-machine relationship. While actualizing the technical capabilities of large language models, it simultaneously organizes and controls the complex “flows” between AI system design and human users.
Various media and media companies induce people to rely on this persona-based technology of AI. Sociologist Manuel Castells argues that the most fundamental form of power lies in the ability to shape the human mind. He emphasizes that in a network society, mass communication as a commons is crucial, and that power is created and exercised through communication processes. According to Wang Hao, who studies “algorithmic colonization,” algorithms that colonize the lifeworld continuously intrude into everyday life, discouraging free interaction and exploration among individuals in loving and trusting relationships, damaging communication infrastructure, and leading to a culture of objectification, a society of manipulation, and a colonized self. The trend toward the automation of daily life potentially reduces our interactive relationships to the automatic execution of punishment and incentives, thus eliminating the need for promised dialogue or the social process of meaning-sharing in big data societies.
In this light, the rise of generative AI is not fundamentally different from highly advanced McDonaldization. To compensate for the weakness of McDonaldization’s superficial differentiation, hyper-rational AI logic is trained to "mimic" human language for smoother communication. Yet the results of such communication between AI and humans ultimately reflect algorithms arbitrarily employed by the AI from the internet. The logic interwoven within such communication is also determined by the AI through optimal rationalization. In the end, human “choice” is reduced to the primary decision of whether or not to use AI. The process of the most efficient communication replacing mental and emotional exchanges between humans leads to the rationalization of emotions, producing the meaninglessness of what once was meaningful—a trajectory reminiscent of McDonaldization.
This does not mean we are unaware of the need to regulate generative AI. But in order to do so, we must first be able to regulate the mental structure of McDonaldization that expands extreme rationality. Can we really break the iron cage of inhumanity that has persisted from early 20th-century bureaucracy to today's generative AI? Can humanity transcend the limits of modernity and postmodernity? Ultimately, the issue is a civilizational dilemma.
