When the tech industry creates buzz around something they need a simple term, and they have a long history of grabbing whatever term is convenient for marketing rather than what is specific and accurate.
The “AI” buzz is no different. The “AI” that people are rightfully (I think) resisting is actually mostly LLM / ML based generative AI that is trained on stolen (or at least allegedly stolen and yet to be litigated) human data sets.
AI in general is a broad, almost meaningless term which covers things like Conway’s Game of Life, the NPCs in your favorite video game, and a million other things.
You can argue for no more computers (and I wouldn’t stop you), but if you want to continue to use computers then I can promise you that you don’t want “AI” kept out of everything. We need to be more specific about what we are resisting.
There are a lot of delightful uses for things we used to historically call AI before the LLM/ML/genAI marketing jerks stole the term and did everyone a disservice.
And just to further muddy / nuance these waters, if you’re using computer based language translation then you are likely interacting with an LLM “AI” – LLM does stand for Large Language Model after all. So there are even some LLMs we probably want to keep around?
I’m a computer scientist and hacktivist of the last 28 years… got started in my tweens. I hate that once again a thing that already existed (AI) was stolen by a marketing department and spoiled.
But also, after all these years, I think computers were a mistake. In fact I think leaving the water to carry the weight of our own bones was a mistake.
Did folks protest every time an AWS instance is spun up?
I can recall way back when we called this sort of thing by various names over the decades: ‘computers’ ‘automation’ ‘expert systems’ ‘the algorithm’ ‘smart this’ and ‘smart that’ as well as just pasting a lower case “i” onto anything and PRESTO the vulture capitalists were suddenly interested! cyber+whatever. Now it’s AI+whatever.
It would be fun to have AI refuseniks swear off life saving medicines, world changing materials science and information advancements that are in the pipeline thanks to LLMs and ‘AI’. It’s already in your iPhone (grab text out of any photo, image content clipping, lookahead keyboard twiddling).
Funny I also recall when computers were hierarchy flattening tools of cultural and spiritual revolution (MONDO, WIRED etc). Now the big money is being made by lil Jeff’s Everything Warehouse (and delivery!), weird Mark’s social thingamajig and Elmo’s House of Hate X verified blue check Nazi bar).
I spent much of my morning making some else’s chatGPT wine ‘tasting’ notes sounds like human writing. I did ask how they managed to get chatGPT to TASTE the wine (poured it into my laptop?) And for f!cks sake, expensive wine should not be described as ‘cotton candy’ twice! in one short paragraph.
Bleeding ‘nuances’ don’t influence the massive burning of resources to steal people’s hard work and then tell them to eat destroying angel mushrooms, stick their dick in a loaf of bread to see if it’s ready, and smoke during pregnancy.
First of all, this isn’t a rejection of technology. It’s looking at the facts and understanding that there are upsides and downsides to new technology, and that some of us are looking at those facts and finding the upsides seriously wanting. People who have spent YEARS in computing and DO understand this stuff are some of the ones who are raising the alarm bells here, Cory Doctorow among them. He’s certainly not one to just reject technology just cause… he has a pretty keen sense of the larger picture with regards to how this stuff is shaping the economy (or being used to shape the economy).
And of course, the Luddites were right. They WERE having wages driven down by machines that did a worse job in making textiles… The same shit is happening here. This isn’t about improving the lives of most of humanity, it’s about the elites hoarding wealth by trying to cut out all of us who do the actual labor to make the capitalist economy work.
Because the people who wrote the giant plagiarism engines they are needlessly injecting into everything use some of the same technology as the little machine learning models used in science, we have to pretend it is the same thing and are not allowed to hate them.
Many opinions about “AI” are only considering the quite recent hype created by so-called generative AI chat- and imagebots. All the other stuff subsumed under the moniker is not highly visible. And even if those other models are considered when forming an opinion, most people don’t seem so realise that the stuff we nowadays call AI has been around for decades.
It’s basically just a bundle of weighted linear regressions.
The fact that people in technology are calling this shit out, is really telling. The people who are boosting AI the most are CEOs, not people who make technology function.
Someone posted this in one of the tech threads recently, and it’s a great take down by someone who knows what they’re talking about…
Aw, hey, I like being called names just because I’m sick of people promoting nigh-useless toys as world-changing, but maybe that’s not the best way to argue?
I like the recent articles by Ed Zitron about charlatan Sam Altman. His vitriol matches mine.
That’s always the problem with pronouncing non-German words in an “accent” imagined by actors whose first language wasn’t German. The best one can hope for is unintentionally funny, but the default is cringe.
old “ai” (nobody called machine learning before the hype seriously “ai”) didnt need the electric output of a middled-sized country to run.
AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution
Some data centers need as much energy as a small city, turning companies that promised a clean energy future into some of the most insatiable guzzlers of power
