Mastodawn

bsmall2 Jun 15, 2025

> “First, you kill the environment in the process of getting to so-called AGI, and then that AGI is going to somehow magically stop forest fires and storms and the wind?” Gebru asks, dumbfounded. “It doesn’t make any sense. There are no specifics of how this could happen.”
#TinmitGebru #AGI #Salami

@[email protected]

Brian Small Jun 15, 2025

> “I can’t believe I even have to talk about these people. That’s how ridiculous it is,” says Timnit Gebru, an electrical engineer and founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute. “They were like some fringe group that nobody took seriously,” she says of how the tech billionaires who talked up AGI were viewed by those who worked in her field. “Everybody sort of laughed at them out of the room. But because of the money, the billions of dollars that were going into it, they started slowly taking over. Fast-forward to now, this conversation about superintelligence is basically mainstream.”

> Gebru argues, the conversation ignores what AI like ChatGPT really is: Not a form of intelligence — which, in and of itself, is almost impossible to define — but rather a large language model that simply scrapes the (inherently flawed) internet and predicts the most likely sequence of words. We are made to think that AI is “thinking,” but that’s just marketing, and misleading marketing at that. A machine that doesn’t really think at all can’t teach itself to think better. And it certainly can’t figure out how to alter the habitability of Mars.

> Likewise, though Altman claimed in January that nuclear fusion — potentially an inexhaustible source of energy — was only a few years away, the scientists working to bring it about scoff at that timeline (there’s a joke that it’s been 30 years away for the past 60 years). Crypto continues to have dubious (legal) utility as compared with other forms of currency, but in 2023, it gobbled up as much energy as the entire continent of Australia. In October, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the solution to the climate crisis was to use more energy: Since we aren’t going to meet our climate goals anyway, we should pump energy into AI that might one day evolve to solve the problem for us. (“Yeah, that’s a quote that he gave in public without, like, a mask over his face or anything,” says Becker. “And he still walks around, unashamed.”) In his first week in office, Trump invited Altman, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to the White House to gleefully announce the building of 20 more AI data centers.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultu…

#TinmitGebru #Broligarchs #SalamiAI #TechBillionaires #TechBillionairePsychology
by #AlexMorris

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

Why Elon Musk and other tech billionaires have a different perspective

Rolling Stone

Brian Small May 19, 2023

.> Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), described the use of AI in debt collection as "punishing those who are already struggling."
.> "In a time when income inequality is off the charts, when we should be reducing things like student debt, are we really trying to build tools to put even more pressures on those who are struggling? This would be true even if the software was working as intended," Gebru said.
.> "In addition to this, we know that there are so many biases that these LLM based systems have, encoding hegemonic and stereotypical views,” Gebru added, referring to the findings of the paper on large AI models that she co-authored with several other researchers. “The fact that we don't even know what they're doing and they're not required to tell us is also incredibly concerning."
.> Some of the companies that stand to benefit most from AI integration are those that purely exist to collect debt. These companies, known as debt buyers, purchase “distressed” debt from other creditors at steep discounts—usually pennies on the dollar—then try as hard as they can to get debtors to repay in full. They don’t issue loans, or provide any kind of service that clients might owe them for; it’s a business model built on profiting from people who fell behind on payments to someone else. - https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjmm5/debt-collectors-want-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-hustle-people-for-money

#AISalami #ChatGPT #DebtCollection #VultureFunds #TinmitGebru #LLM #LLMBias

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

The collections industry is pushing GPT-4 as a dystopian new way to make borrowers pay up, replicating the debt system’s long history of racial bias.

Brian Small Apr 1, 2023

.> Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices..> While there are a number of recommendations in the letter that we agree with (and proposed in our 2021 peer-reviewed paper known informally as "Stochastic Parrots"), such as "provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic" media, these are overshadowed by fearmongering and AI hype, which steers the discourse to the risks of imagined "powerful digital minds" with "human-competitive intelligence." Those hypothetical risks are the focus of a dangerous ideology called longtermism that ignores the actual harms resulting from the deployment of AI systems today. - https://www.dair-institute.org/blog/letter-statement-March2023

#AISalami #TinmitGebru #EmilyBender #EmilyMBender on AI problems as more of #TheCorporation problem...