Here is your must-read article for the day, a profile of @emilymbender, and her efforts to deflate the ridiculous hype around large language models such as ChatGPT.
It's also about the people who are behind that hype, and about what their way of thinking has the potential to do to us.
It's worth reading all the way to the end.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html
So frustrating how conversation about #LLM and #ChatGPT completely misses the most important point.
We're so easily distracted by #SciFi questions like whether it's a mind, is it sentient, will it destroy humanity.
(No, no, and maybe.)
The most important point is that we (rightly) fear AI run amok because we (rightly) fear #capitalism run amok.
Yes, it hallucinates bogus facts.
Yes, it can be tricked into acting like a creepy stalker.
No, it doesn't simply predict the statistically most likely next word in a sequence.
It actually has an internal model of concepts and relationships, and can draw meaningful and truthful insights that are useful to humans.
In many cases, it's more useful than search engines or Wikipedia.
It's a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools, it will be used for good and for evil.
And you can bet that the evil uses are currently being accelerated and amplified by billionaires and profit-seeking corporations exploiting workers and customers and subverting democracy to enrich themselves.
Same as it ever was.
That's why the real point is that we need non-profit public-benefit organizations to drive safe and positive and trusted uses of this technology.
The Internet Archive, Wikipedia and craigslist are good examples.
The genie is out of the bottle. We can't wish this technology away.
Let's ensure it gets used for good.
Let's ensure humanity has a fighting chance against capitalism amplified by intelligent machines.
@ares @ct_bergstrom @emilymbender But this is a technology that requires hundreds of millions of dollars to implement. The field is dominated by the largest monopolies on the planet. AI is an expression of pure hypercapitalism, it's impossible to divorce it from that matrix.
Our future -- artifical humans owned and operated by mega-corporations, slowly eating away at our conception of humanity.
@zenkat @ct_bergstrom @emilymbender
yes, it's bleak
it's hard to imagine how we can prevent dangerous practices by capitalists who can operate from any jurisdiction
but at least we can build a trusted alternative that won't manipulate us with disinformation to extract profits to billionaires
wikipedia also costs more than a hundred million a year to operate
i'm incredibly thankful that wikipedia and mastodon and open-source software exist in a world controlled by capital
safe and trusted non-profit alternatives to capitalist #ai should also exist, or we're truly fucked
Carl T. Bergstrom
ares
zenkat